Michael Hersch is a very distinct musical voice.  His subject matter tends to be disturbing and his musical style is abrasive.  One of his most recent works is the one act opera Poppaea which is based on the life of historical Poppaea after the point at which the Monteverdi opera leaves off.  Strictly, it’s not set in Nero’s Rome but rather in a time and place inspired by it.  The very effective libretto by Stephanie Fleischmann includes a distinctly non-classical take on space and time.  It’s an exploration of overweaning ambition and where it leads which is about as relevant to today’s world as any theme could be.

The story arc is basically Nero marries Poppaea who produces a daughter.  Octavia (Nero’s former wife) is forced to commit suicide.  The child dies.  Poppaea becomes increasingly disenchanted with Nero’s debauched behaviour but becomes pregnant again anyway.    Most of what’s left of the old senatorial order is forced to commit suicide following the so-called “Pisonian plot”.  In the aftermath of the famous fire Nero and Poppaea row furiously and Nero beats the pregnant Poppaea to death.  Still obsessed with her, he has a pretty boy who looks like the dead woman castrated and marries him.  This is staged in a series of scenes that aren’t strictly linear and sometimes involve characters in separate spaces being aware of what another is doing.  Hence my earlier comment about space and time.

It’s violent musically as well as dramatically.  Both Ah Young Hong, as Poppaea, and Silke Gäng, as Octavia, have extremely difficult parts which demand some stratospherically high singing (usually extended, vibrato-less phrases) combined with speech, whispering and much more.  In contrast, Steve Davislim’s Nero merely combines much more conventional, and quite conversational, tenor singing with a fair bit of speech.  There are also three Handmaidens; Svea Schildknecht, Vera Hiltbrunner and Francisca Näf, who also have some extremely challenging ensemble singing.  There’s also a small chorus; Ensemble Solovoices, who also have some very demanding work to do.

The orchestral writing is atonal and abrasive.  It’s scored for eighteen players including piano and it’s heavy on the wind section.  There’s a lot of use of percussion and extended technique for winds and strings.  It gets a fully committed performance from Ensemble Phoenix Basel and their music director Jürg Henneberger.

The recording is of a live performance at Don Bosco Basel in September 2021.  It’s quite a busy staging so one notices a lot of stage noise.  That aside though it’s very well recorded.  I listened to a 48kHz/24 bit digital version and it’s excellent in every way.  There’s also a very comprehensive booklet with the full text (very necessary as a lot of it is sung so high it’s impossible to make out) and essays on the background, the music, the drama and the dramaturgy.

It’s an interesting and disturbing work that I would love to see on stage (which is hardly likely to happen in Toronto!).  Audio only, it’s still a pretty good way to experience a kind of music theatre that just doesn’t really get any play in North America and there are enough photographs in the booklet to get an idea of what the theatre experience was like.

Poppaea will be released on February 23rd 2024 in physical CD (two disks), MP3 and CD quality and hi-res FLAC.

Catalogue information: New Focus Records FCR390