CCMusic.com

L'incoronazione di Poppea is a milestone in the history of music and the high point of the early baroque. This recording avails itself of an international cast and period instrument ensemble including established performers and young talents from Italy, France, Russia, Ukraine, Turkey, Albania, Colombia, Ecuador, Brazil, Mexico, China, Mongolia and Korea. Conductor Federico Bardazzi has analyzed the expressive aspects of the score so that the music would bring out the nature of the characters and has worked on the variety of tone colour available in the basso continuo associated with the "affetti" throughout the opera and hence the association of particular instruments with the main characters. The instrumental arrangements are highly diversified, ranging from sopranino and guitar, through passages for strings only to exuberant tutti sections with percussion. A hallmark of Bardazzi's approach to performance of 17th century repertoire is the interaction of treble instruments with voices in choral numbers, duets, versified pieces and airs and also foregrounding those instruments in certain sections of the opera identified with a given character. The many tone colours of this broad palette valorize the instrumental writing in the vocal numbers, which is in keeping with the dictates of Monteverdi's seconda prattica.