After an absence of Spain for the past four years, Pirotecnia Zaragozana brought Spanish passion back to Montreal, along with summer weather, with ideal conditions for their third participation in Montreal, and the first for their joint designers, Miguel Pérez and Jesus Roche. A straightforward design style was used and this decision paid off.
As expected, the Zaragozana products are very high quality and we were treated to a visual feast of exceptionally vivid colours throughout the display – not only were the colours bright, they were of equal brightness so that mixes of cool colours (such as blue and violet) went very well with the warm reds, oranges and yellows.
Synchronization was perfect throughout the display and there was excellent interplay between ramps three and five, with the whistling mines on ramp 5 being particularly effective. I liked that the Spaniards incorporated flights of traditional rockets into their display too. Other simple, but effective touches were the use of coloured flares across ramp three to delineate a change to a new language segment in the soundtrack – this nicely complimented the non-instrusive narration.
The soundtrack was well done, though there were couple of places where the edit was a fade out that didn’t quite cleanly link into the next segment. The soundtrack illustrated the theme very well, with a great selection of songs about love in four languages.
Nautical effects were well used, particularly in the finale and the overall staging of the display was excellent too. There was a mini-finale during the Vivo per Lei song, building to a nice colourful climax which included nautical shells of strobes with massive barrages of colour shells above and then winding down with some beautiful strobing horsetails. The audience enthusiastically cheered at many moments during the display, but particularly after this song.
I found the second half of the display a bit of a repeat of the first half in some ways, with similar effects used, but it was still well designed and executed. Despite the lack of really large calibre shells, Zaragozana still managed to fill the sky due to the firing angles used and it wasn’t really noticeable that there were no 10″ and 12″ shells.
The finale, to local star Robert Charlebois’s J’t’aime comme un fou worked exceptionally well – and I particularly enjoyed the ground salutes that were synchronized to the drums. After the end of the display, the Spanish team received a well deserved standing ovation, as the Jacques Cartier bridge disappeared under a massive cloud of smoke.
This was an excellent display which must stand as a contender for one this year’s awards. A straightforward and well-executed design with beautiful products, perfect weather and a full audience gave the feeling that the competition is really getting going now.
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