✭✭✭✭✩
<b>by Claudio Monteverdi, directed by Marshall Pynkoski
Opera Atelier, Elgin Theatre, Toronto
April 25-May 2, 2009</b><b>
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Opera Atelier’s current staging of <i>The Coronation of Poppea</i> is a remount of its acclaimed production in 2002 of Monteverdi’s final opera. Although there are several cast changes one key player has returned--American male soprano Michael Maniaci in the role of the Emperor Nero. This is an extraordinarily opulent production, played with verve by the Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra and masterfully sung and acted. Besides this, it is worth seeing if only to experience the eerie beauty of Maniaci’s voice, the closest one will come to hearing the sound of the castrati of Monteverdi’s period.
Though dating from 1642, the opera is unusually modern in its outlook. This is one of the few operas until the 20th century to depict the triumph of evil over good. The time is 62-65AD. Nero is Emperor of Rome and Poppea (Peggy Kriha Dye), his mistress, plots to become Empress. She has already divorced her husband Ottone (Olivier Laquerre), but she must get Nero to divorce his wife Ottavia (Kimberly Barber) and alienate Nero from the paternal influence of his tutor Seneca (João Fernandes), who disapproves of her. Meanwhile, Ottone and a noblewoman Drusilla (Carla Huhtanen) plot to kill Poppea. Seneca is the only wholly good character in this insidious world of moral compromise.
Marshall Pynkoski directs with an attention to detail, down to the very syllable, that one only finds in the finest productions of plays. Dye’s performance is magnificent. Calculation reigns in her every lovely note and gesture. She is so coolly manipulative she makes Carmen, opera’s most famous seductress, look like an amateur. Pynkoski rethinks the concluding love duet between Nero and Poppea so that the gleeful Poppea sings of love not to Nero but to her newly-won crown while Nero’s face increasing clouds with anger, clearly foreshadowing the rage in which he will kill Poppea four years later. After so cleverly implying it, to depict Poppea’s demise, as Pynkoski does, is needless.
In other small missteps, he presents Seneca so full of rage he topples furniture--dramatic but hardly likely for Rome’s most famous Stoic. He unaccountably allows Barber a 19th-century melodramatic vocal and gestural style that clashes with the production’s 17th century ethos. Yet, overall, in Pynkoski’s hands and under David Fallis’s baton, Monteverdi’s final masterpiece emerges as the epitome of irony, an indissoluble wedding of angelically beautiful music to demonically thrilling theatre.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in <i>Eye Weekly</i> 2009-04-29.
Photo: Michael Maniaci and Peggy Kriha Dye. ©Bruce Zinger.
<b>2009-04-29</b>
<b>L’Incoronazione di Poppea</b>