Nuova Era's recording of Monteverdi's masterpiece L'Incoronazione di Poppea has little to recommend it. The recording was made at a live performance, and besides the obligatory audience coughing and the clomping stage noise, some scenes have an unrelenting rustling going on -- maybe the costumes were made of taffeta or tulle. The singers are always clearly audible, but the sound in the high range is shrill and strident, and when the harpsichord is in its upper register, it sounds like a rattling tambourine. The orchestra is made up of modern instruments played with little sense of appropriate period articulation or phrasing. The orchestral sound is thin, in contrast to the full sound that's possible when a smaller ensemble of period instruments is played well. Alberto Zedda leads the orchestra in a leaden, lifeless performance that lasts well over a half hour longer than the average reading of the score. There's sometimes reasonable justification for a slow performance of Monteverdi, but there appears to be none here, and the music and drama remain inert. The quality of the singing varies from the nicely done to the laughable to the downright embarrassing, with only an occasional nod toward an attempt at Monteverdian ornamentation. The comic characters are shamelessly overdrawn, and the serious characters are blandly wooden. Several singers, mostly principals, thankfully, stand out in the midst of the mediocrity or worse: soprano Josella Ligi as Nerone, soprano Daniela Dessì as Poppea, soprano Susanna Anselmi as Ottone, and mezzo-soprano Adelisa Tabiadon as Ottavia all have attractive voices, even though none bring particularly strong dramatic personalities to their roles. The CD does get points for performing the Act 1, scene 11 confrontation between Poppea and Ottone with Monteverdi's original, eccentric key relationships intact, without "fixing" them as most modern performances do. If Zedda's tempi weren't so lethargic, the scene might have had the brilliantly dramatic effect the composer intended, but as performed here, it, like the rest of the performance, has minimal impact.
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