L’INCORONAZIONE DI POPPEA
Monteverdi
Norwegian National Opera
EuroArts 2058928 [DVD]
I’ve been thinking about Seneca, the Roman dramatist who had a considerable influence on Shakespeare. I’ve never read any of his plays, and was getting ready to find some online when I remembered that he was ordered to commit suicide by the Emperor Nero, and that this scene appears in Monteverdi’s opera L’Incoronazione di Poppea (‘Poppea’s coronation’). Which was the best DVD of that extraordinary opera, I wondered, and started rooting around.
First stop, as usual, was YouTube, and there was the complete opera conducted in 1979 by the then youthful Nikolaus Harnoncourt, in a sumptuous stage production from Zurich by Jean-Pierre Ponnelle, and with the incomparable Finnish bass Matti Salminen as Seneca. In a way this is a classic rendition — period costumes, Baroque sets and the highest musical standards.
A musically robust production in modern dress from La Venexiana, an Italian early music ensemble, with Emanuela Galli as Poppea, was also there on YouTube with French subtitles. It dates from 2010 and is vigorously sung, and even more vigorously acted. I was grateful for this style because Monteverdi can sometimes sound thinly-textured to modern ears, and there’s nothing whimsical about this opera’s plot. The forces of good are routinely routed and the forces of lust and violence prevail. Poppea is a call-girl, and shortly after having her crowned, Nero reputedly kicked her to death. This sort of thing needs strong treatment.
Strong treatment comes in full measure in a version from Norwegian National Opera in 2010, which I found in the Naxos Video Library. Visually, its distinctive feature is that it’s filmed in black and white — and red. Modern dress, this time with kitsch additions, is again used.
The historical Seneca died by cutting his wrists in a bath. Here he sits on stage and his blood runs into an enamel basin. The death is followed by a homoerotic scene in which the singers try to desecrate his dead body and wallow in his blood. Yet strangely this seems in the spirit of this bizarre opera, not to mention in the spirit of the Roman attraction to cruelty and spectacular, blood-soaked deaths.
There’s a sense, too, in which this is a very Senecan production. His tragedies were characterized by revenge, ghosts and blood. Titus Andronicus is Shakespeare’s most Senecan creation, with a character having her hands cut off and so on. Despite passages of interpolated South American-style dance music in this opera production, all in all it out-Senecas Seneca in no uncertain fashion. Yet though none of the soloists is an international star, the singing is uniformly excellent. Italian, English, German, French, Japanese and Norwegian subtitles are available on the DVD.
LANG LANG
Mozart, Chopin, etc.
Live at the Royal Albert Hall
Sony Classical 88843082549 [DVD]
Lang Lang continues to be the world’s most charismatic performer on the piano. His face records every moment of rapture, and even his eyebrows are expressive. Sony has come up with a DVD of one of his 2013 concerts in London’s Royal Albert Hall. But all in all it’s a mixed blessing.
It’s always wonderful to watch Lang Lang, but four Mozart piano sonatas in a row are a bit much to take. Enthusiasts may call them deceptively simple, but even so they’re not great masterpieces. Also problematic is the camerawork, happy to include some shots from high in the auditorium when Lang Lang is just a tiny figure in a blue light.
The result is that this DVD can’t compare with Lang Lang Live in Vienna [reviewed in Taipei Times February 13, 2011]. There he plays far more substantial music, including two Beethoven sonatas, and the camera rarely strays from his face and hands. Beethoven’s piano sonatas are all monuments in the history of the genre, whereas Mozart wrote many of his sonatas simply as exercises for his students. For all these reasons, that earlier product, unlike this more recent one, is one of the finest DVDs I know.
Again, Mozart’s piano music has been called “flirtatious”, and if anyone is suited to bringing out this element in it it’s Lang Lang. But instead he treats it as soulful, and I’m not convinced that this approach works. The four Chopin ballades that follow are far more successful. His encores are all rapturously received by the London audience, though some are insubstantial at best.
SCHUMANN
performerImogen Cooper (piano)
CHAN 10841 [CD]
Lastly, a CD from Chandos by the English pianist Imogen Cooper of piano music by both Robert Schumann and his wife Clara Schumann looks promising — crisp and full of feeling at one and the same time. Hers is a self-effacing musicianship, balanced and craftsman-like, in strong contrast to Lang Lang’s bravura showmanship, endearing though that most undoubtedly is.
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