Handel's Il Trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno
Krzysztof Warlikowski (stage director), Emmanuelle Haïm (conductor) – With Sabine Devieilhe (Bellezza), Franco Fagioli (Piacere), Sara Mingardo (Disinganno)...
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Cast
Krzysztof Warlikowski
Małgorzata Szczęśniak
Christian Longchamp
Felice Ross
Claude Bardouil
Denis Guéguin
Program notes
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