POPPAEA (Michael Hersch) Basel 2021 Ah Young Hong, Steve Davislim, Silke Gäng

Information on the Performance

• Work Title: POPPAEA   
• Composer: Hersch Michael   
• Libretto: Stephanie Fleischmann    Libretto Text, Libretto Index
• Venue & Opera Company: Don Bosco, Basel, Switzerland  
• Recorded: September 9 & 12, 2021
• Type: Staged Opera Live
• Singers: Ah Young Hong, Steve Davislim, Silke Gäng
• Conductor: Jürg Henneberger  
• Orchestra: Ensemble Phoenix Basel  
• Chorus: Ensemble SoloVoices  
• Stage Director: Markus Bothe  
• Stage Designer: Eva Butzkies  
• Costume Designer: Marius Kob  

Information about the Recording

• Published by: Michael Hersch Music  
• Date Published: 2024  
• Format: Streaming
• Quality Video: 4 Audio:4
• Subtitles: nosubs  
• This Recording is NOT AVAILABLE from a proper commercial or public source

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ON THIS PERFORMANCE

PROGRAM LEAFLET

“Disturbing, contemporary music theater of the kind like ‘Poppaea’ by Michael Hersch used to be a tradition at the Wiener Festwochen. It’s good that Vienna is now adopting this genre in a modern way. Even better if it succeeds like the co-production with the ZeitRäume Basel festival at the Odeon. Hersch shows the mistress of the Roman emperor Nero as a Lady Macbeth … overwhelming, opulent music that pairs perfectly with the verses of Fleischmann’s libretto. The percussion, especially the gongs, are used menacingly, the strings shimmer as if electrified. The chorale-like passages in the female choir seem like startling injections.”
— Kurier

“In this score, Michael Hersch dared to create an expansive as well as an agonising opulence …The 18-member Ensemble Phoenix Basel sounded as if they were 80-strong … Poppaea offers singers and musicians material both great and rewarding. Ever new individual colours peel out of the lush, crashing waves of the metrics of this score. The brass, sometime after Octavia’s slow bleeding, the flute, and the caustically questioning bass clarinet, after the embers of the first piano glimmer from the core of Poppaea and Nero’s marital hell … Like Macbeth, Poppaea gets caught up in the whirlpool of inflicting violence until she herself becomes the victim. In a visionary juxtaposition, Octavia and Poppaea, whose destinies are so similar, prey on each other with a bizarre ambivalence of pity and rivalry. Whether ‘Rome is burning’ is to be taken as code or as plot no longer matters in light of this … Hersch’s opera and this premiere show that the human beast, even when it is up to its neck in plastic waste, still lusts after its own self-destructive priorities.”
— Neue Musikzeitung

“‘… the orchestra emits ghostly sounds that leave no doubt about the horror of the scene. ‘How does it feel?’ Octavia, wife of the Roman emperor Nero, is executed; Poppaea, the mistress, has prevailed … Octavia bleeds out silently to a monologue by her murderer. ‘Is the pain sharp or dull?’ Bernini’s ‘Ecstasy of St. Teresa’ comes to mind, the marble sculpture that shows an angel piercing her with the arrow of divine love. Bernini breathtakingly meets the voluptuous, chaste simultaneity of love and pain. The U.S. composer Michael Hersch succeeds in translating these ambivalences into music.”
— Die Presse

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