Handel - Il trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno (Buxton, 2024)

George Frideric Handel - Il trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno

Buxton International Festival, 2024

Christian Curnyn, Jacopo Spirei, Anna Dennis, Hilary Cronin, Hilary Summers, Jorge Navarro Colorado

Buxton Opera House - 18th July 2024

Performances of Handel operas can be hard work for the audience as much as a challenge for a director to make something of them, but they really shouldn't be. His oratorio works evidently need an extra little bit of dramatic action when performed as staged works, and those that you could categorise as allegorical fables even more so. The Buxton International Festival production of Il trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno ('The Triumph of Time and Disillusion' as it is normally referred to in English) does its best to find a suitable context to get across the moral message without being too stuffy about it, and if it doesn't entirely make it work dramatically, it at least succeeds in getting across the meaning of the work and highlights the extraordinary beauty of the piece.

Much as he 'excavated' Rossini's La donna del lago to bring it into the present day for Buxton in 2022, director Jacopo Spirei comes up with a fine modern-day situation that establishes the right character for each of the allegorical figures of Beauty, Pleasure, Time and Disillusion (or Disenchantment but closer to meaning Truth). Not quite as hard-hitting as Krysztof Warlikowsi's production for Aix-en-Provence in 2016, here these figures are at least more clearly of a whole, depicted as a family in a drab living room which you could probably call life. It's Christmas time moreover, so there is a little optimism at home even if it's just the delusion of Beauty who thinks this is the way it will always be, that nothing will ever change. Beauty and her sister Pleasure certainly live in the moment, but their father and mother, Time and Disillusion, have some harsh realities to lay out before them.

And they don't mince their words. Well, the words are fairly flowery, as you would expect in a Handel work, one moreover with a libretto written by a Cardinal, Benedetto Pamphili, but the director has a way of making sure the truths hit home. Not so much perhaps in Act I, which drags its feet a little, as do Beauty and Pleasure who refuse to accept the wisdom and experience of their elders. The Second Act, which has one or two of Handel's most beautiful arias including the famous and beautiful Lascia la spina, is a different matter as reality starts to hit home. The opening of the Christmas presents for Beauty turns out to be is a disappointment, but it's not half as stripping of any illusions as Time dragging a coffin onto the stage to remind her that Beauty fades and dies. Nothing too subtle about the delivery of that message.

That's as much as you can do without going the full Warlikowski with this work, where the director of the Aix production layered on elements of the personification of these competing ideas as being on opposing hemispheres of the brain and made allusions to the works of Derrida. What designer Anna Bonomelli manages to do to elevate the Buxton production to a suitable sphere somewhere between reality and moralising is place this within a beautiful set with effective lighting design that contributes to establishing the nature and tone of the work.

It can still be a bit of a slog but that's the nature of Pamphili's somewhat overly florid and solemn libretto, and it's also the nature of Handel's graceful musical treatment, striking something of a mournful note throughout. There are no Vivaldi-like sprints to enliven the uniformity of tone here, but there are some nice directorial touches that find an underlying dark humour and bring out the poignancy that is most definitely there to be found in the music and the situation.

For all its moralising solemnity, Il trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno is still an astonishing work of great beauty, particularly if you are fortunate enough to hear it played live in a suitable venue with singers of quality and suitability for these roles. That is where the Buxton production succeeds brilliantly. The Buxton Opera House itself is also perfect for reduced orchestration, an ideal size for intimacy and acoustic fidelity. With Christian Curnyn conducting the period instrument orchestra of the Early Opera Company - as previously with their Acis and Galatea here in 2021 - it sounded marvellous, beautifully paced and measured, the music balanced with the singing, allowing you to hear and feel the playing of every instrument and get the meaning behind every sentiment.

Ultimately, the brilliance of the work is in the singing. These are gorgeous roles in a range of complementary voices and the casting was impressive, each of them given the opportunity to express their characters. I was particularly taken with the fullness of voice of Hilary Cronin as the Goth dressed Piacere/Pleasure. Hilary Summers' darkly seductive contralto made Disinganno/Disillusion an irresistible force for unwelcome truths, giving the role an otherworldly quality as well as making it feel real and something you could relate to. Which I suppose is the best you can do with a work like this, and it's clear that this is the intention of the director. Jorge Navarro Colorado as Tempo/Time was marvellous, blending beautifully with Summer's Disinganno in their Act II duet. There was some fine singing too from Anna Dennis as Belleza/Beauty, conveyed all the superficiality of the character as well as her deeper emotional response to the dawning - if never wholehearted - acceptance of her fate. 

Not a cheery work by any means, but as far as the Buxton International Festival's treatment of Handel's oratorio goes, this is one regard in which beauty and pleasure win out.

External links: Buxton International Festival

Handel - Acis and Galatea (Buxton, 2021)

George Frideric Handel - Acis and Galatea

Buxton International Festival, 2021

Christian Curnyn, Martin Constantine, Anna Dennis, Samuel Boden, Jorge Navarro Colorado, Edward Grint, David de Winter

Buxton Opera House - 18th July 2021

When it comes to Handel, the Baroque music and formality of the libretti can often be a little bit dry, particularly his pastoral dramas and religious oratorios. There's nothing however that a good bit of direction can't fix, and even the love story of a shepherd and a nymph in Acis and Galatea can be enlivened and made relatable, as the Opera Theatre Company demonstrated in their setting of the story as a drunken fracas in an Irish pub. Directed by Martin Constantine, Buxton's production also updates Acis and Galatea, but finds another way to work with the old-fashioned sentiments expressed in the libretto, though not quite so consistently or successfully.

Rather than finding a way into the work to make it come alive, the 2021 Buxton International Festival production takes a distanced half-hearted academic approach to the work, the setting being a Human Sciences International Symposium in 1962 being held to explore the subject of love - worldly and otherworldly - as it is dealt with in Handel's Acis and Galatea. It's not a bad idea as such, introducing the key players and bringing a focus through slides and projections to the key words and sentiments to do with love that librettist John Gay repeats throughout the opera. Hence, joy, pleasure and happiness are highlighted but also wretchedness.

Each of the delegates present their papers on the subject, while a stage hand provides props to put these ideas into the context of the present day. It being 1962, it's the model idea of the happy couple in a domestic setting, an armchair and a table with a pet bird in a cage perhaps symbolic of their love. Slides show the traditional roles of the charming dutiful wife cooking for and looking after her husband after a hard day's work tending his sheep. And then Polyphemus comes along and in a jealous rage crushes their love (the bird) and eventually his rage becomes so great that he strikes down Acis.

This scenario on its own attempts to get across the diversity and extreme nature of emotions engendered by love but can appear rather broad and superficial. Handel's music certainly weaves an elegant and stately path through the trials and vicissitudes of love. It's beautiful, stately, a little old-fashioned and rather French tragédie-lyrique in the formality of its drama dealing with the conflict between mortals and otherworldly creatures and gods, of which Acis becomes one of their number in the tragic conclusion. Musically its a delight although a little pedestrian and unvarying in pace and dynamic, so it can do with a little more oopmh (technical term) from the direction. Unfortunately it doesn't quite get it here.

Not all the actions relate to a conference presentation, but it's not clear either whether fiction becomes blurred with fact over a love affair between colleagues or whether there's an academic disagreement. The actions unfortunately don't really relate to what is going on. One baffling scene has Acis trying on jackets from a rail and ending up putting them on one on top of the other in his upset state, before being calmed down by Damon. Some of the tragedy is inevitably diminished by Acis suffering little more than an admittedly vicious blow to the head by his academic/love rival, but sometimes bringing Handel down to earth isn't a bad thing.

And in a way, the conclusion succeeds in some respect at getting that across. Throwing off their stuffy formal suits, the academics at the conference step down from the platform to enjoying the pleasures that nature has to bring. The reveal of a field behind the curtain and projection screen in the hall is also a little strange, but the idea is at least buoyed along by the music and sentiments of Handel's beautiful score. And by the singing. The quality of the ensemble is as essential in Handel as the individual voices and they were superbly cast here and beautifully delivered.

Anna Dennis was a sincere lyrical Galatea, Samuel Boden a fervent Acis, Edward Grint a suitably raging Polyphemus, Jorge Navarro Colorado combining the roles of Damon and Coridon with a lovely warm timbre, and David de Winter blending in beautifully as Chorus. The complementing of voices for the roles was lovely; Acis and Galatea genuinely sounded like a heavenly match together, contrasting with darkness of Polyphemus, the ensemble of five voices just gorgeous.

Christian Curnyn's direction of the Early Opera Company orchestra didn't always make the music sing, but if anything can make the sentiments of Handel and the potentially stuffy quality of the musical arrangements come alive in the absence of a suitable idea and setting it's the voices and by the conclusion, this Acis and Galatea was soaring.

Links: Buxton International Festival