Opera North’s Coronation of Poppea: a premium-rate sex-line of an opera

Virtue, hide thyself! The Coronation of Poppea opens with a warning and closes with a love duet for a concubine and a psychopath, their union celebrated in sinuous melismas over a blameless passacaglia. First performed in 1643, Monteverdi’s final opera is all about talking dirty and talking tough. Seductions, threats, boasts and betrayals are snapped, spat, stuttered and smooched over harmonies that pinch and squeeze like a premium-rate sex-line. Does it work in English? Yes and no. There are casualties in Tim Albery’s slick, vicious Opera North production, some historical, some poetic, some musical. In Laurence Cummings’s hybrid edition, drawn from the Venice and Naples scores, transpositions and cuts proliferate. Yet the emperor’s lust for Poppea is palpable to a degree rarely felt in the opera house. This is just as well, for Monteverdi’s toxic hero and heroine not only show us their lovemaking but review it for us, detailing the kisses and caresses of the previous night with shameless, self-congratulatory pleasure.

Virtù, Fortuna and Amore wear modern dress, the first a dowdy academic (Claire Pascoe), the second an executive in hooker heels (Ciara Hendrick), the third a flint-eyed teenage boy in high-tops and snapback hat (the brilliant Emilie Renard). Nero (James Laing) and his entourage saunter about in 1960s tailoring, madmen dressed after Mad Men. There are tweeds for Seneca (James Creswell), shoulder holsters for the hitmen Lucano and Liberto (Nicholas Sharratt and Daniel Norman), and a chiffon dressing-gown trimmed with fur for Sandra Piques Eddy’s magnetic Poppea. The pit is empty. Two violins, a lirone and a harpsichord sit to one side of the stage; two theorbos, a harp and a second harpsichord on the other. Led from the keyboard, Cummings’s orchestration is organic, with the only distinct match of particular instruments to a particular voice — a honeyed brew of lirone, lutes and harp — reserved for Poppea.