La Bohème opera comes to Bern suburb
A suburb of the Swiss capital, Bern, took centre stage on Tuesday for an adventurous television production of Giacomo Puccini's opera La Bohème.
Rather than in a theatre, Swiss television staged the opera in a high-rise block of apartments, an idea which provoked surprise and positive reactions.
Around 400 people participated in the opera with some 30 extras drafted in from the Gäbelbach suburb of Bern.
The Bern Symphony Orchestra, with 67 musicians, was situated about 800m away in Bern’s new Westside shopping mall.
Some 23 cameras were on hand to record the performance, seen by about 577,000 viewers on television.
Swiss television has delved into the opera world before, last year successfully producing Giuseppe Verdi’s La Traviata in Zurich’s main railway station.
Apart from being shown on three Swiss television channels, the performance was also live on the Arte culture broadcaster in French and German.
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