Bel Canto at Caramoor: Guillaume Tell by Gioachino Rossini, by Michael Miller
William Tell by Gioachino Rossini
Bel Canto at Caramoor
Saturday, July 9 at 7:30pm ~ Venetian Theater
Friday, July 15 at 7:30pm (repeat performance) ~ Venetian Theater
Orchestra of St. Luke's, Will Crutchfield, conductor
Cast:
William Tell - Daniel Mobbs, bass-baritone
Matilde - Julianna Di Giacomo, soprano
Arnold - Michael Spyres, tenor
Jemmy - Talise Trevigne, soprano
Hedwige - Vanessa Cariddi, mezzo-soprano
Walter - Nicolas Masters, bass
Rodolphe - Rolando Sanz, tenor
Fisherman - Brian Downen, tenor
Melchthal - Jeffrey Beruan, bass
Gesler - Scott Bearden, baritone
Leuthold - Michael Nyby, baritone
In Steffani's Niobe, premiered in 1688 in the Munich Residenz, a confluence of Italian and French traditions in a Bavarian court, BEMF gave us an opportunity to see an opera which is not quite like any other. It combines so many different genres and situations, that it is comprehensible only when one witnesses the spectacle as it unfolds on stage. Another rarity, although a much more famous one, Rossini's Guillaume Tell, is also unique in its own way, and certainly a stranger to modern opera-goers. Rossini's grandest work disappeared from the repertoire of both the Paris Opera and the Met in the early 1930s, and even before then, it was heavily cut—most likely as alien to Rossini's intentions as the version of Il Barbiere di Siviglia that was current before the early 1970s. Even the famous overture doesn't appear as often on symphonic programs, although it did show up at Tanglewood last weekend...on an Italian opera pot pourri, where, as a "French" overture, it was the odd man out. It is truly astonishing, when one reads Philip Gossett's program notes for Caramoor, to learn the time and effort Rossini put into learning about French operatic conventions and the traditions of the Paris Opera in order to produce a work that was as genuinely French as possible, without abandoning his personal style—which involved retaining some Italian conventions—a far more profound effort than Wagner's in Tannhaüser or Verdi's in Don Carlo. Rossini, by then in his late thirties, remade his compositional technique in a foreign mode and from that created a unique hybrid of great genius. Guillaume Tell was to be Rossini's first French opera, but in fact it was his last operatic work altogether, for a complex variety of reasons. He never gave himself a chance to develop further his own peculiar mixture of beautiful vocal writing, vigorous, even daring harmonies, folk-tunes, ballets, spectacle, conflict, and the celebration of national autonomy and freedom.

