©Takashi Yashima

In 2022, Hiromi Go, the legendary Japanese pop singer, celebrated his 50th anniversary by touring throughout the country to meet his fans. In the final month of that tour, a special concert took place that was mainly composed of his ballads, this proved extremely popular and was performed with an especially luxurious stage setting.

This special concert was revived in 2023 for a special one-night show at Nakano Sun Plaza Hall, this time not only celebrating Go’s 50th anniversary but also commemorating the concert venue’s 50th anniversary and its very last year in operation. The Sun Plaza Hall, which had served as a landmark concert venue for many famous artists in Tokyo for half a century, finally closed in the summer.

Naomasa Kajiura, an award-nominated lighting designer for PRG Japan, who has supported Hiromi Go’s tours for decades, chose to use Ayrton Diablo and Mistral as main set-up for this special staging.

“Not only for this show, but also for other shows, these devices are small and compact, yet offer excellent brightness and functionality, and enable dynamic performances,” he enthused.

“This is especially true in Japan when these types of tours are conducted mainly in local concert halls, where there is a tendency for those concert halls to have weight limitations on the load the trusses can safely hold. In these situations, Diablos and Mistrals are especially useful: they still offer great brightness with low power consumption. That is why I felt these fixtures would be best for this show.

“In addition to [this], the fixtures are perfect not only as a beam intended to light the space, but their compactness allowed me to set the fixtures directly on the stage, even in the smaller halls. This allowed me a wide variety of expressions on the floor, and at the same time use it effectively to light the singer.

“On a different occasion, I had the opportunity to use Perseo and Huracán fixtures in a major large stage setting, and they were great! Their LED source showed comparable robust brightness among other fixtures, even against the large screens that formed the background.”

PRG Japan has been the local exclusive distributor of AYRTON since 2019. “We feel that Ayrton’s extensive fixture lineup can be used in a variety of ways to suit the characteristics of each venue in different Japanese entertainment scenes,” Kajiura concluded. “More and more they shall become the preferred choice of Japanese lighting designers in the near future!”

Ayrton