Co-directed by Andrea Bocelli and Pharrell Williams, St. Peter’s Square’s first-ever music concert featured award-show-worthy sound throughout via a pair of Quantum852 consoles
On September 13, Rome’s Vatican City hosted Grace for the World, the first-ever music concert held in St. Peter’s Square, reportedly drawing more than a quarter of a million people to the venerable plaza. The event, which was accompanied by a spectacular drone show above the Sistine Chapel, concluded the “World Meeting on Human Fraternity 2025,” a two-day gathering that brought together people from around the globe to reflect on humanity in an age defined by social and environmental challenges, as well as rapid technological progress.
Also streamed live on Disney+, Hulu, and ABC, a massive worldwide audience tuned in to witness uplifting musical messages delivered by a star-studded lineup, including co-directors Andrea Bocelli and Pharrell Williams, along with John Legend, Jennifer Hudson, Jelly Roll, Karol G, and others. And making sure that all of the music performed at this historic event came through crystal clear was a pair of DiGiCo Quantum852 consoles, at front of house and monitors, provided by the Berlin, Germany office of Clair Global.
“This was more than a concert, it was a true event, and the broadcast put it on a level with a world-class awards show,” observes Jeremy Peters, who works from Clair Global subsidiary Sound Image’s Escondido, California office, and who served as the production’s audio co-designer with audio supervisor Michael Abbott. “This was literally the equivalent of a Grammy broadcast, but in St. Peter’s Square, as if it was in Las Vegas! It was very much a team effort to pull this off in such a short amount of time, but it really came together incredibly well.”
Peters, who mixed monitors for the artists performing for the show, as he has for years for Pharrell Williams on tours, says the project initially seemed fairly routine. “At first, I was just thinking, It’s a normal Pharrell show with some guests, and we’d put an audio package together with some extra mics and ears and then call it a day. But that wasn’t what this was at all,” he laughs.
For that reason, Peters says he turned to the DiGiCo Quantum852, the desk he says that he and FOH engineer Kyle Hamilton have been using religiously since it was introduced. “I’ve used it with Doja Cat at Coachella, with Usher, and with Stevie Wonder, so it’s my go-to console when I have to go to work,” he says. He likes its analog feel, but also how it puts so much information at his fingertips. “For the monitor person on a show like this, that’s critical,” he says, noting that the monitor input count was nearly maxed out. And that was with the full range of what monitors can be: IEMs, d&b and L-Acoustics wedges, butt-kicker subs, and coverage for a 350-voice choir. “I had well over 90 auxes, hundreds and hundreds of channels, six SD-Racks, and an Orange Box interface for digital playback I/O. Kyle and I normally share racks, so we went through multiple Prodigy MX multiformat audio matrixes to get out of the stage racks, sending all those streams to the truck via MADI,” he explains.
And while he’s a fan of the Quantum processing, especially Mustard, Peters says it was the console’s flexibility that made it work. “This show was by far more ins and outs than I have ever had to manage. Normally, on an event like this, you’d likely have two monitor engineers, two house engineers, a dialog mixer, and so on. But, here, it was one front of house guy and everything else was coming through me on stage. But there’s no other console I would want to work on to do this show. The flexibility of the Quantum852, the worksurface — there is nothing else like it.”
Grace for the World’s FOH engineer, Kyle Hamilton, is also a fan of the Mustard processing, particularly its gate, compressor and EQ capabilities. But, like his colleague in monitor world, his first order of business was how to manage nearly 300 inputs for a wide variety of artists onstage. “I mean, between the 90-piece orchestra and the choir alone, they said the total input count would be close to 500,” he recalls. “I just know that there was an ocean of people on stage, plus the core band itself.”
The Quantum852 offered him the processing he needed to manage all of the individually mic’ed instruments on stage, which particularly helped control the impact of the percussion instruments in the reverberant space. In fact, he says, it all came down to management. “The Quantum852 was on it, one hundred percent,” he says. “The multiple worksurface layers, the routing flexibility — it let us what we had to do to corral that massive infrastructure. The workflow let us do multiple things at the same time, because everybody needed something different — often at the same time! So that flexibility was huge. Any other desk just wouldn’t have been able to handle it.”
One thing Hamilton didn’t need from the Quantum852’s onboard trove of processing was reverb. “We were in St. Peter’s Square, man,” he says, in awe of that sonic memory. “All of that stone and glass. We had reverb that you would pay thousands of dollars for in a recording studio. You could say it was heavenly.”
