Handel's Il Trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno

This sublime performance of Handel's first oratorio is "as good as opera gets," according to The New York Times! Staged by Krzysztof Warlikowski for the 2016 Aix-en-Provence Festival and conducted by Emmanuelle Haïm, it stars Sabine Devieilhe, Franco Fagioli, Michael Spyres, and Sara Mingardo in top form. 

Il Trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno, composed in Rome in 1707, features four allegorical characters: Beauty, Pleasure, Time and Disappointment. "Beauty chooses to ignore that existence is finite, preferring to admire herself in the mirror of Pleasure. But Time and Truth constantly remind her that 'beauty is a flower that blooms in a day and then dies."

Under the baton of Emmanuelle Haïm, the Concert d'Astrée accompanies a brilliant cast featuring Sabine Devieilhe (Bellezza), Franco Fagioli (Piacere), Sara Mingardo (Disinganno) and Michael Spyres (Tempo).

This oratorio is a scandal. Reading its libretto is a shock. It's a purely dogmatic work whose title mirrors works from Stalin's Russia. Every performance of Trionfo should be preceded by a commentary discussing its ideological content […]. We are far from the Greeks and their mythology. We are in Rome, at the heart of religious power, in the center of the Counter-Reformation. Krzysztof Warlikowski.

Picture: © Pascal Victor