US Edition 
Guillaume Tell, WNO, review, 'bravo!'
The highlight of a forcefully communicated performance of Rossini's Guillaume Tell is the stupendous chorus singing
What a privilege I’ve had hearing Rossini’s wonderful operatic swansong twice within a few weeks, performed in both cases to a high degree of excellence.
The Edinburgh Festival’s concert version used the later Italian redaction. Welsh National Opera opts instead for a rather heavily cut edition of the original French version of 1829, masterfully conducted by Carlo Rizzi. He and his orchestra struck the ideal balance between the music’s epic dignity and its melodic freshness; from the sparkling account of the splendid overture to the final glowing peroration, everything was crisp, clean, shapely and buoyant. Bravo!
There was much excellent solo singing too, although as is so often the case at WNO, it was the stupendous chorus, currently trained by Alexander Martin, which set my spine tingling. When it gathered in a mighty crescendo to hail the advent of Liberty and the glory of nature, I felt like falling to my knees in awe.
The disappointment was the indisposition of Gisela Stille, who mimed the role of Mathilde while Camilla Roberts, also ailing, sang it (minus her third act aria) from the side of the stage. Stille looked ravishing, at least – a vision of the Empress Sissi in riding habit.
But there were no shortcomings elsewhere: Barry Banks dispatched Arnold’s pyrotechnics with insouciant ease and projected throughout with firm phrasing and clarity of tone; David Kempster was an imposing Tell, properly gruff and muscular if somewhat woolly of French diction; and there was some first-rate support from Fflur Wyn (Jemmy), Leah-Marian Jones (Hedwige), Nicky Spence (Rodolphe) and Clive Bayley (Gesler).
About David Pountney’s production, designed by Raimund Bauer and Marie-Jeanne Lecca, I am ambivalent. Couched in the aesthetic he developed at ENO in the Eighties, it had bags of showy vitality and graphic force: the main points of plot and character were forcefully communicated, and some vigorously stylised folk-dancing inventively choreographed by Amir Hosseinpour rightly stopped the show.
But setting the drama against a backdrop of an Antarctic glacier when the libretto emphasises Switzerland’s lush forests and valleys is insensitive, and presenting Gesler as a cackling bald toothless villain in a wheelchair is plain Austin Powers silly. Worse, the spirit of bucolic idyll and romantic landscape pervasive in the music is nowhere acknowledged or suggested.
The problem is that Pountney is instinctively an ironist and a debunker, whereas this opera is just about as sincerely romantic as it gets.
Until 4 Oct, then touring. Phone 029 2063 6464; www.wno.org.uk