Festival Music

L'incoronazione di Poppea

Usher Hall

Keith Bruce

five stars

WHAT a journey Monteverdi has taken us on in the thirty-odd years of his life since Orfeo on Monday. Gone are the moral certainties and hopes of eternity on the fields of Thrace, replaced by a Rome where adultery is excusable and punishment is meted out to the good. Shostakovich's Mtensk is surely visible in the distance.

That progression is signalled in the prologue, where Cupid (Silvia Frigato) wins out over Fortune and a prim if assertive Virtue (Anna Dennis, later excellent as poor, deceived Drusilla). As Poppea, Hana Blazikova is not much wanton as wanting. In the intimate company of her Nerone (Kangmin Justin Kim), she is a determinedly acquisitive woman of wiles, pitted against the equally thrawn wronged wife Ottavia (Italian mezzo Marianna Pizzolato, who sang Rossini's Stabat Mater at last year's festival, making her only appearance in this series).

Kim is one of three counter-tenors, adding another musical dimension, Italian Carlo Vistoli singing Ottone in a less flamboyant style,and Pole Michal Czerniawski playing Ottavia's louche nurse Nutrice, whose character is set up in parallel opposition to Poppea's maid Arnalta (Lucile Richardot). The men also have some of the finest ensemble singing of this score, with the twelve-strong chorus beseeching Nero's teacher Seneca (excellent bass Gianluca Buratto) not to take his own life absolutely extraordinary at the end of Act 2.

Conductor John Eliot Gardiner steered his company and the superb instrumentalists of the English Baroque soloists with the sure hand we have seen all week – one in which it has been a huge privilege and delight to know the singers, and learn an enormous amount about the genius of Claudio Monteverdi.