In a Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts (APA) rehearsal room, conductor Nicholas Kok and director Andrew Sinclair are working on a student production of L'Incoronazione di Poppea, written in 1642 by Claudio Monteverdi, one of Italy's earliest opera composers. Opera back then was freewheeling populist entertainment compared to the current multilayered construct, according to the two men who have extensive international experience in the art form.
And directors then might not have had that important a role, says Sinclair, resident director with the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. 'People were just positioned on the stage; the music was the interpretive side and the director's role, if there was such a thing, was probably not as it is today.'
Kok remarks that he would have been similarly redundant. 'I don't think anyone would have conducted, since operas were done with very small forces. I've seen the inventories from the theatres that show how much the musicians were paid and how many performances were given,' the Briton says.
'The idea was to put on something that was going to be very popular, and you made money.'
Indeed, the staging of such an early work, which will be performed on March 22, 24 and 26 in the academy's Drama Theatre, reminds us how far opera has evolved over the past four centuries. There was a public thirst for those pioneering works that leaves today's contemporary composers with a mixture of admiration and envy.
'Pieces like Poppea, and many others that were lost, they were more like the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical theatre pieces of their day,' says Kok. 'They wrote hardly anything down; the players would have known what to play. If you play in a rock band, you know pretty well the basic harmonic language. Back then, they would also have known what to expect.'
