Monteverdi marathon

L’Incoronazione di Poppea
The Proms

Glyndebourne’s visits to the Proms are usually highly successful, which can seem odd considering that the home auditorium is so comparatively intimate, not to mention comfortable and air-conditioned, with fantastically good acoustics; while the Albert Hall is celebrated for its large-scale lack of any of those qualities. And Monteverdi’s last opera L’Incoronazione di Poppea, though it is about imperial power and every kind of domination, is for most of its length a work that takes place in what one imagines to be small rooms, or at least settings where intensely private carryings-on of one or another kind are conducted. Poppea turned out to be no less and no more effective in Robert Carsen’s production ‘staged for the Proms by Bruno Ravella’ than it was in Glyndebourne, though some of the musical balances were strikingly different. It had seemed to me in the opera house that Emmanuelle Haïm’s version of the score, which she also conducted, was fairly rich, but at the Albert Hall I could hear little apart from one or another continuo instrument, though the voices were clear and mainly reasonably loud.