Poppea: Janice Hall’s lyric-coloratura voice, pretty, firm, and technically adept, is well chosen for this music. It could at moments be heard as a little cool for the character, but I like her presentation of Poppea as a self-admiring girl, fully aware of her charms but in her way innocent, who in the course of the action learns to dispense with the innocence. Danielle de Niese begins rather scrappily, and in the recits I can’t always tell what’s interpretive inflection and what’s a technically determined over-open vowel or slightly askew mix. Like Bardon, she’s being pushed to demonstrate everything with both body and voice, and is an extrovert performing temperament to begin with. She settles in, though, and is effective in the terms set by the production.

Ottone: For a fair stretch in the heart of the opera, this character is the center of attention. He’s the one whose predicament we are most invested in, and his music reaches deeper than any of the others’. The part was originally taken by a woman, the contralto Francesca Vanini, and in terms of vocal type that is surely the way it should be cast. So we have, for Carsen/Hagenbrock, a falsettist, Filippo Mineccia, and for Hampe/Östman (back in the bad old end days of historically uninformed casting) a baritone, Claudio Nicolai. My default preference would be the baritone, but in this case it’s not, since Mineccia has the most interesting of all the falsetto voices heard on any of these recordings and is an eloquent interpreter, while Nicolai, though sincere and diligent, is not beautiful enough of timbre or regularly enough in the centers of pitches to take advantage of the part’s opportunities. Further, while in the older performance Ottone and Poppea trade brief but captivating arias at their Act 3 reconciliation, as per my old score, in the more recent one these are replaced by a duet, “No, ch’io non apprezzo di te,” in which case the music is better served by two upper-family voices. But for me, these are always case-by-case decisions, not doctrinal ones. If, for example, the Ottone were Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau on good behavior, one might be content with that even in the duet.

Claudio: In the Schwetzingen performance it’s Günther von Kannen, a noted Alberich; in the Vienna one, Mika Kares, an artist new to me. Both have good bass voices with steady tone and fine low notes. Both have sufficient command for their two big, pompous arias. Both render the recits clumsily and go tonally dead and lose the line when passagework comes along. I much prefer the interpretive track followed by von Kannen—but see above re credit and blame for that. I look forward to hearing Kares in other repertory.

Nerone: My preference is obvious; it would take a really objectionable tenor to change it. No disrespect, though for Arditti (also the Nerone on those Göttingen CDs). He sings to the limit of his voice type, drinks the production’s Kool-Aid, and probably has a fine old time for himself.