Young Bulgarian soprano Sonya Yoncheva more than holds her own as a determined, irresistibly tantalizing Poppea. A woman with Hollywood starlet looks and curves, Ms. Yoncheva has engagements as Donizetti’s Lucia and Verdi’s Violetta on her horizon, and her Poppea might be viewed as a study for both rôles. Spinning out golden tones from start to finish, it is hardly astonishing that her Poppea should so captivate Ottone or so arouse Nerone. Costumed like a Jean Harlow vixen, Ms. Yoncheva exudes sex appeal, her hold on Nerone developing as surely as though she were Salomé performing the Dance of the Seven Veils before Herod. Physical beauty, alert acting, and capable singing are rarely as absorbingly combined in a single performance as in Ms. Yoncheva’s Poppea. Perhaps Monteverdi intended his portrait of Poppea as a sly commentary on the power of a pretty seductress to triumph over goodness, her misdeeds forgiven and forgotten as soon as she smiles. In Poppea’s toying with Nerone and Ottone, her triumph might also be interpreted as a victory of lust over love, though here, too, a musical problem is encountered: ‘Pur ti miro, pur ti godo,’ the concluding duet for Poppea and Nerone, though almost certainly not the work of Monteverdi (modern scholarship suggests the little-remembered Benedetto Ferrari as the most likely candidate for having composed both the music and the text), is unabashedly beautiful. If truly not the work of Monteverdi, it was almost certainly appended to L’Incoronazione di Poppea either by the composer himself or with his blessing [the duet is present in autograph materials of both the Venice and Naples versions of the opera], so it is possible that the apparent celebration of the triumph of scheming, the text of the duet ripe with subtle sexual undertones, was at least partially intentional. Ms. Yoncheva’s and Mr. Cencic’s voices intertwine like a lovers’ embrace in the duet, closing the opera in an atmosphere of relative dramatic calm and sensual release. Visually and musically, Ms. Yoncheva leaves nothing to be desired, her performance as Poppea the proper centerpiece of a potent account of Monteverdi’s opera.
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