Swan Lake
Designed by Arthur and John Rozzi. PyroSeeking firing with 165 32-cue modules.
A perfect summer’s evening with pleasant temperatures, low humidity and gentle winds were the backdrop to the first participation of Arthur Rozzi’s new company, though Arthur himself being a veteran of the competition, already having brought home two Silver Jupiters. American entrants in the competition are always popular and the capacity audience at La Ronde was a testament to this fact.
After the countdown, the display began with a narration and dark skies, but it wasn’t clear if this was intentional or not. However, after a few seconds of music, it became clear there was a technical problem. Fortuately, this time, the display was stopped and an announcement made that there were technical problems. As Rozzi were firing from the control room under ramp 4, flashlights could be seen in there as the technicians scrambled to find and fix the cause. After about 15 minutes, an announcement was made that the display would fire shortly. A couple of minutes after that, ramp 3 suddenly burst into life, but without any music, leaving me to speculate that the crew were seeing if the display could be fired at all. A few more minutes passed and then, at 10:27, the narration started again and the display came to life with the music shortly thereafter, this delay equaling that seen by Kimbolton in 2003 when high winds delayed the start of their display.
The display, once it got going, was well staged with ramp 3, in particular, often being used to give the impression of dancers moving across a stage, with interesting runs of mines at different angles, forming the sort of swoop a dancer’s arms would make. Other times fronts of angled mines and comets would be used to accent key points in the music. The shells above often had effects that complimented the music. There was certainly a good variety of products used, with impressive large shells and very bright orange strobing horsetails. However, I found there was some repetition of effects and I found the firing pattern used for the shells was very conservative, being almost always straight up for the large calibre shells. This gave the feeling that the display area was somehow constricted. I wondered if this was due to the entire display being designed using visualization software, as a computer screen just cannot recreate the field of vision a real member of the audience actually is capable of seeing in Montreal.
The soundtrack was very good, though there was noticeable hiss in parts of it – maybe it was because it was from classic recordings of the ballet. I did find, though, that there were a few periods where the music started, but there were no fireworks. Of course, in a real ballet, this is exactly how it is – we have the music start before the dancers come on stage, but the ballet benefits from the stage design itself. It might have been better to have something to fill in these periods of darkness, especially since the technical problems at the start lent the worry that the firing system had stopped working.
Ramp 5 was used very effectively, but I was surprised at the paucity of nautical effects used. We often see “water ballet” shells used in Montreal – these are fountains which sit on the lake and spin around, like little ballerinas. Given that I don’t ever recall seeing a pyromusical ballet, this would have been an ideal opportunity to use them.
The display, though very enjoyable, was marred by some technical problems as occasionally parts of ramps 2 and 3 would appear to be missing, giving an unfortunate asymmetric feel to the display. Other small issues were the use of “slice” cakes to create a sweep of fans of one shots from left to right. These worked well, but there was at least one occasion where the final cake in the sequence fired in the reverse direction. Unfortunately, it’s details like this that make all the difference. The display design was very straightforward, “a classic display” according to Arthur Rozzi, but such a display has to be crisp and precise to work with the theme. Unfortunately, I didn’t get the feeling with display. Contrast this with the last predominantly-classical music display we had in 2007 by IP of Germany – this was clinical in its precision, almost too clinical according to some.
The finale was good and I enjoyed the faux-finale aspect followed by a carpet of nautical flares on the lake, but the final part wasn’t as big as I expected, being somewhat eclipsed by the faux-finale. A daring attempt by the American team to use Swan Lake, and they almost carried it off – the audience certainly enjoyed the display and appreciated the fact that the false start allowed the display to be seen in its entirety, rather than spoiling the display missing out parts – it was definitely worth the 27 minute wait.
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