Guillaume Tell by Rossini

For those unafraid of the heat, a particularly pleasant summer expedition is to Caramoor, the park and summer musical venue.  The grounds are lovely, and a picnic can be packed or ordered in advance and sandwiches can be purchased for those both spontaneous and lazy.  What they do not have is a good supply of picnic tables--take a tarp or blanket and prepare to fight gravity. 

William Tell or Guillaume Tell is one of the world's most famous almost never performed operas.  John had it on his wish list for years and finally flew to Switzerland last year to see it.  Naturally it is now being done here although only in a concert version (they claim semi-staged, but the staging is really minimal.

One of  the reasons it is rarely performed is because of the difficulty of the music, but it is also very long.  Rossini wrote five and half hours of music, and apparently even he never tried to perform the whole thing.    The version at Caramoor is about four hours, and the music is glorious.  The voices are lovely, and oddly enough I almost remember sets and backdrops--I know they weren't there, but the music and plot are easily visualized, and we had just seen Sleeping Beauty so I sets and costumes and spectacle in my head.

One of the glories of Caramoor is the lectures and concerts ahead of time.  Philip Gosset, who often does the lecture is a treasure of scholarship, charm and performance.  He can whip of a theme on the piano seemingly without thinking about it.  He can explain the traditions, the techniques, the various influence, and who performed it when.  The tale of William Tell was originally by Schiller, and   Rossini was an Italian writing in French for production at the Paris Opera.  The opera was then translated into German and the Italian translation is from the German.  There are influences galore for Mr. Gosset to tease out.