courtesy of PIAS
This Friday harmonia mundi will release an “Anniversary Edition” package of Claudio Monteverdi’s opera L'incoronazione di Poppea (the coronation of Poppea), the last of his three surviving operas and one of his last compositions. The recording was made during a performance at the 2018 Salzburg Festival, and the package consists of three CDs of audio and a DVD of what was happening on stage. As may be expected, Amazon.com is currently taking pre-orders for this release.
I should begin with a cautionary disclaimer. I have never been to Salzburg. As a result, my only knowledge of the annual festival there is based on streaming video. In the context of those experience, where a composer such as Monteverdi is concerned, my first thoughts are whether “star power” will take priority over “subject matter experts.”
The good news is that one could not hope for a better subject matter expert than William Christie, who conducts his own instrumental ensemble, Les Arts Florissants. (2019 marks the 40th anniversary of this group, hence the “Anniversary Edition” designation of the release.) On the other hand I was not quite sure what to make of the photographs of the staging in the accompanying booklet, so I decided that I would focus strictly on the audio portion of the release. Even there, however, I must confess to having some doubts about soprano Sonya Yoncheva in the title role, given that all previous knowledge of her came from Metropolitan Opera video documents of her performances of nineteenth-century selections.
Still, we must remember that this opera was composed for performance at a Venice Carnival pre-Lenten celebration. This was an occasion for indulging in vulgarity to get it “out of one’s system” during the solemn honoring of Lent. That point of view tends to prioritize purveyors of spectacle over subject matter experts, and that priority is richly honored by Giovanni Francesco Busenello’s libretto. The opening Prologue, sung by the allegorical figures of Fortune (soprano Tamara Benjesevic), Virtue (soprano Ana Quintans), and Love (mezzo Lea Desandre), makes it clear from the outset that Virtue has not got a chance. The power of Love will bias Fortune in favor of vice over virtue.
For those who do not already know the story, the basic narrative involves how the Roman Emperor Nerone (Nero, mezzo Kate Lindsey) gets rid of his Empress Ottavia (mezzo Stéphanie d’Oustrac) so that he can marry his mistress Poppea. In the midst of all this unbridled passion, the philosopher Seneca (baritone Renato Dolcini), Nero’s former tutor, tries to sway the Emperor to follow a more virtuous course. His failure to do so results in his taking his own life. As a result, Poppea’s path to the Imperial Throne is a grotesquely bloody one. Nevertheless, at the end of the opera, she and Nero sing what may well be the most ravishing duet in the pre-Classical repertoire, “Pur ti miro, Pur ti godo” (I gaze at you, I possess you).
From a musical point of view, Christie’s direction could not be more satisfying. There is a clarity and expressiveness that is maintained consistently by all contributing vocalists. For all of its underlying irony, the account of “Pur ti miro” is a loving one; and Yoncheva could not fit better into the seventeenth-century context that Christie established. Listeners can also enjoy the full extent of the vulgarity that countertenor Dominique Visse brings to the role of Arnalta, Poppea’s aged nurse, most of whose contributions to the libretto are all about “looking out for number one.”
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