The title of this album doesn't very accurately describe its contents, since it includes considerably less than half of the score of Poppea, and is filled out with extended scenes from
Mercadante's Il Giuramento and excerpts from
Spontini's La Vestale, all recorded in the early '50s. The unifying force in these diverse works is the singing of
Maria Vitale, a leading soprano on the Italian stage in the 1950s who recorded little and never achieved international stardom. Her voice is large, and she gravitated toward dramatic soprano repertoire, so she tends to sound heavy as Poppea. Little about this recording of the
Monteverdi has much authenticity. The whole cast, including a stentorian
Carlo Bergonzi as Nero,
Rolando Panerai as Ottone,
Oralia Dominguez as Ottavia, and
Mario Petri as an underpowered Seneca, sings according to the conventions of bel canto, with not a trace of the Baroque performance practice that would become common in a little more than a generation. The recording is an intriguing document of how far performances of Baroque opera have come since the mid-twentieth century, but it doesn't offer many rewards as a purely musical experience. The casting decisions likewise reflect an understanding of the score that has long since been eclipsed; Arnalta is sung by a mezzo, Ottone by a baritone. The endeavor is very earnest;
Nino Sanzogno leads
Orchestra e Core di Milano della RAI (using what is probably the 1953 realization of the score by
Giorgio Federico Ghedini), in a staid account of the opera that is preponderantly glum and serious, except for some quaintly pretty interludes. There is some weirdly irrational reordering of numbers, such as moving the crucial Act I duet with Ottone and Poppea, truncated and missing its ritornelli, as well as Arnalta's aria, "Oblivion Soave," to the third act. The opera ends with the coronation chorus rather than "Pur ti miro," which is now almost universally understood to be written by a composer other
Monteverdi, but which is included in virtually all modern performances and recordings because it was certainly part of the opera's very early performance history.