Set Design Often Requires Suspension of Disbelief
Curiously, we are puzzled by an ever-present film camera on the stage used to capture the Hapsburg spectacle. Even more confounding is the oversized lighting in Swiss peasant scenes that seems to be there only so it can rise to signal a sunrise. When the lovers meet on the sly, they are on and around supersized stuffed horses with frozen poses of carnival animals.
Projection designs help fill in gaps, to show the raging storms whipping up the sea or to give an inside view of Arnold’s nostalgia and love for his father. These peeks into Arnold's interior life come via home movies of father showing son how to plant on their beloved land.
Signage frames the opera from beginning to end. In the first scene, we see the words EX TERRA OMNIA, translated from Latin as All Comes From the Earth. The curtain shows the clenched fist of resistance in Soviet Realism style — or perhaps an echo of symbols adorning the Italian Socialists who brought Mussolini’s end. This fist curtain foreshadows Act II when the Swiss Peasants wrap red kerchiefs around their hands and raise in salutes. Once the carnage begins, the signs of blood are never washed from the walls, framing Mathilde’s aria lamenting her love lost to battle and the fight-to-the-death spirit of the resistance.
Live or Screen? Stage Access Seems to Put Out a Dare
The promotional materials from Stage Access note that Rossini’s William Tell (Guillaume Tell) is rarely performed due to the high-note challenges for the tenor, so masterfully handled by Flórez. You, too, might agree that any opera logging more than four hours is also a challenge for the audience. Follow the tip from this reviewer: Break up your viewing into two or three segments and make sure to add on an encore listen to the William Tell Overture while your heart is still swelling at the finale.
Better, lobby your local opera house to do the same, viz. break this ticket up into two performances. Maybe they can also take a tip from Broadway’s production of Sweeney Todd and sell apple pies, apple butter, apple quiche, and more — perhaps in a long break affording ample time for a brain salad course in between a matinee and evening performance.
Meanwhile, Stage Access’s presentation of the 2013 Rossini Festival performance of William Tell is not to be missed.
