These lists show the audio and visual recordings of L'incoronazione di Poppea by Claudio Monteverdi. The opera was premiered in Venice in 1642-43, but after a 1651 revival in Naples it remained unperformed for 250 years. It began to enter the general opera repertory in the 1960s, and thereafter was increasingly performed in leading opera houses and festivals.
Summary of recording history
The first recording of L'incoronazione, with Walter Goehr conducting the Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich in a live stage performance, was issued in 1954. This LP version, which won a Grand Prix du Disque in 1954,[1] is the only recording of the opera that predates the revival of the piece that began with the 1962 Glyndebourne Festival production. In 1963 Herbert von Karajan and the Vienna Staatsoper issued a version described by The Gramophone as "far from authentic",[2] while the following year John Pritchard and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra recorded an abridged version using Leppard's Glyndebourne orchestration. Leppard conducted a Sadler's Wells production, which was broadcast by the BBC and recorded on 27 November 1971. This is the only recording of the opera in English.
Nikolaus Harnoncourt's 1974 version, the first recording without cuts, used period instruments in an effort to achieve a more authentic sound, although Denis Arnold has criticised Harnoncourt's "over-ornamentation" of the score, particularly his use of oboe and trumpet flourishes.[3] Arnold showed more enthusiasm for Alan Curtis's 1980 recording, live from La Fenice in Venice. Curtis uses a small band of strings, recorders and continuo, with trumpets reserved for the final coronation scene.[4] Subsequent recordings have tended to follow the path of authenticity, with versions from baroque specialists including Richard Hickox and the City of London Baroque Sinfonia (1988), René Jacobs and Concerto Vocale (1990), and John Eliot Gardiner with the English Baroque Soloists.
In more recent years, videotape and DVD versions have proliferated. The first was in 1979, a version directed by Harnoncourt with the Zürich Opera and chorus. Leppard's second Glyndebourne production, that of 1984, was released in DVD form in 2004.[5] Since then, productions directed by Jacobs, Christophe Rousset and Marc Minkowski have all been released on DVD, along with Emmanuelle Haïm's 2008 Glyndebourne production in which the Festival finally rejects Leppard's big-band version in favour of Haim's own small orchestra setting.
List of recordings
The lists below refer to complete performances; excerpts and highlights are excluded. The year given is the year of the recording.
^Mike Ashman, Review of 2009 video of the Gran Teatre del Liceu, Gramophone, September 2012, p. 84: "Harry Bicket’s orchestra, their performance a reminder of how much progress has been made in the realisation of early Venetian opera in the last half-century. The hand-picked European cast is in fine fettle, Connolly’s Nero outstanding; picture and sound appear to serve the production. This is, of course, not the only way to do Poppea but even the strongest DVD rivals to this set (Haïm/Carsen on Decca and Christie/Pizzi on Virgin) seem a little over-egged in comparison."
^Richard Lawrence, "Tandberg’s bloodbath Incoronazione in Oslo", Gramophone, June 2012, p. 87: "How best to depict these grotesques for a 21st-century audience? Ole Anders Tandberg’s solution is to put them in modern dress and to have them indulge in what the booklet-note calls ‘frequent lashings of blood and sex’. ... The stage is littered with as many bodies as in a Jacobean tragedy. You are hardly going to buy this for the singing but, for what it’s worth, the best is from Tim Mead and Patricia Bardon. Monteverdi’s scoring has been enhanced, not too offensively. The filming – often from above – is excellent".
^David Vickers, "Sivadier’s 2012 Incoronazione on screen from the Lille Opera", Gramophone, August 2013, pp. 76–77: "A stark black and grey set inhabited by the entire company in modern dress (Prologue) gradually evolves into a boldly colourful ‘Roman’ world (lots of red, orange and gold) in which people act and look approximately like ancient Romans – but with small splashes of modern‑day props for some sort of ironic effect. ... Sonya Yoncheva [is] a cynically seductive Poppea. Max Emanuel Cencic has the range to bash out Nerone’s highest notes, and the occasional histrionic high passages and over‑the‑top delivery suit Nerone’s brattish character. Ann Hallenberg’s jilted Ottavia and Tim Mead’s Ottone (each by turns jealous, desperate and broken) are vocally and dramatically outstanding. Paul Whelan’s husky singing is well suited to the doomed Seneca. ... I am less satisfied by Haïm’s musical direction. ... Those averse to early music purism might admire Haïm’s ostentatiously upholstered textures and anachronistic methods but in truth this musical aesthetic is a post‑1970s modern construct, just like Sivadier’s stage action."
^David Vickers, Review of the Salzburg 2018 video, Gramophone, October 2019, p. 99: "The lucidity of the drama is smudged by over-activity on stage from experimental dancers doing an inordinate amount of experimental dancing, often in various states of undress, and always with one of them at centre stage whirling in perpetual circular motion until the next dancer on the rota gives them a cuddle and relieves them. Characters with no business being on stage lurk persistently without purpose and contradict theatrical sense. Ottone does not disguise himself in Drusilla’s clothes for the attempt on Poppea’s life, rendering the rest of Act 3 inexplicable. Some of the numerous cuts are obtrusive."
