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The happy couple: Kathryn McKellar as divinely-favored gold-digger Poppea and Amanda Keil as the philandering Roman emperor Nero. (That's "Nerone" for the purposes of the Italian libretto.)
L'Incoronazione di Poppea
Cambridge Family YMCA Theatre, 820 Mass. Ave., Cambridge
June 18-20 at 7:30 p.m., and June 21 at 2 p.m.
Free! (See operahub.org for details, including ticket reservation instructions)
Traditionally, an opera is performed with (a) an orchestra, consisting of many different instruments, and (b) tickets, for which you must pay money. Often a good, fancy-dinner-sized chunk of money. So how is OperaHub getting around that for Claudio Monetverdi's L'Incoronazione di Poppea?
"The neat thing about electronic sound is that it provides an unlimited palette to work with," says director and arranger Jordan Rodu, who makes use of a Virus TI virtual analog synthesizer, as well as Sonar and Audacity softsynths. "Different sounds can represent different characters"—traditionally, this would've meant mean harp for deities, harpsichord for emperors, and so on—"and most importantly sounds particular to a character can actually change as the opera progresses. One effect that we're really excited about—we're pre-recording the music and vocals for the gods, who will be represented on stage by modern dancers.
"Even the voices of the gods have been electronically manipulated. This creates an aural and visual distinction between the gods and the mortals in a way that would not have been possible using only acoustic instruments."
"Our solution to addressing the fact that Monteverdi's audience would have known of Poppea's fate"—Nero would kick a pregant lady in the stomach until she died—"is by vocoding the prologue to the Latin text of a historian of the time. Think Daft Punk."
And as for (b), Poppea will be performed at the Cambridge Family YMCA Theatre, and the tickets will be free. "We'll be seating the audience only in the balcony of the hall—which is in a horseshoe-esque shape. We're hoping to acheive a Roman amphitheatre type effect using this arrangement."
The Boston Early Music Festival just finished their (considerably more traditional) run of the very same opera at the (considerably more expensive) Calderwood in the South End. (BEMF's lovely production is summering in the Berkshires as of Friday.) What is it that's so urgent about this seventeenth-century opera right now?
"The resolution isn't particularly moral," says Rodu. "The 'mean girl' wins.
"We wanted to juxtapose the old and new—applying an electronic re-orchestration to a Monteverdi opera is about as old and new as it gets.
"OperaHub's mission is to make opera accessible... We wanted to chose a Monteverdi opera that could really sing to this generation—no pun intended—who am I kidding: yes it was. And a mythological opera like Orpheo doesn't have quite the same relevance as Poppea. It's a really excellent piece of music that we wanted to bring to the Boston community in a unique way."
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