🐎🎭 Gioachino Rossini – William Tell (Overture finale) Verbier Festival soloists – Voices Verbier Festival anniversary gala (2018) • The opera this music comes from runs nearly four hours, and almost no one has ever seen it from start to finish. At its 1829 Paris premiere, the audience knew at once that something had shifted. Donizetti joked that only the middle act could have been written by God, and that very night the musicians walked to Rossini's door to play the finale in his honor. Even so, the lead tenor part is so merciless that few houses dare to stage it. So the whole work became almost a rumor, while the overture itself hides far more than the passage everyone remembers. • It doesn't begin at a gallop. It opens almost in darkness, with a single cello sketching dawn over a mountain. Then the strings collapse into a storm that swells and passes. In the silence left behind, a low wind, the English horn, echoes the call Swiss shepherds once used to bring the cattle down the slopes. Berlioz, who usually turned up his nose at Rossini, admitted it was a whole symphony squeezed into a few minutes. When the trumpets and the cavalry charge finally arrive, they are the sun after the storm, not the start of the story. • It's worth noticing the ages in the line. Some recorded their first albums before half the others were born, shoulder to shoulder with musicians just starting out. In the middle stand a few trained singers, a soprano and a bass, holding the pitch for the instrumentalists to lean on. That is what keeps it standing without rehearsal: the professional voices carry the foundation, the rest hang on. Watch their faces as they sing and you'll see complicity, held-back laughter, people nudging each other to come in on time. You rarely gather this many people of this rank with so little pose. • 👉 Follow for the best of classical music daily on your feed. • • • #rossini #soprano #opera #classicalmusic - @reels.classics