There’s a dash of good faith needed from director and audience alike to conjure up a discernible plot for Il trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno, Handel’s first oratorio. Written by one Cardinal Benedetto Pamphili, the libretto is, despite its author’s day job, relatively light on religious language – and certainly no biblical epic in the vein of Handel’s later English oratorios – but dense with allegory and heavy-handed in its morality. The “triumph” in the title is Tempo (Time) and Disinganno’s (Disillusionment) success in turning flighty Bellezza (Beauty) away from superficial earthly pleasures and towards the more solemn bliss of piety.
Handel’s score gives both Beauty and Pleasure such ravishing music that it’s hard not to feel he was on their side all along, and Jacopo Spirei’s production takes a similar tack. Here, the pair are two wayward adult daughters, both dressed for very different parties, and home for Christmas with their painfully upstanding parents. The fight over Beauty’s future plays out – first as farce, then as tragedy – as her family’s dogmatic crushing of her spirit.
Anna Bonomelli’s set is instantly recognisable as any of a hundred middle-class living rooms, but surrealism shows through the cracks as family tensions ratchet; by the time a downtrodden Beauty, platinum wig and sequins traded for grey hoodie and grey hair, sings her exquisite final prayer, it’s been transformed into a funeral parlour.
There are nevertheless a surprising number of laughs along the way, many of them courtesy of contralto Hilary Summers’ sardonic, Hyacinth Bucket-tinged Disillusionment, whose narcotic-induced dance break (yes, really) is almost as astonishing as her powerhouse of a voice. As her husband, Time, Jorge Navarro Colorado is milder-mannered, but his elegant tenor takes on a slow-burning sinister edge as his pompous proclamations intensify.
Despite the libretto’s best attempts to the contrary, Hilary Cronin’s delightfully truculent Pleasure emerges as the moral heart of the piece – her Lascia la spina, the aria which would later become Rinaldo’s Lascia ch’io pianga, is radiantly sung – while soprano Anna Dennis is ideally cast as fragile, mercurial Beauty: beguiling of tone and of presence, she commits thoroughly to the production’s conception of the character, searching out nuance in Handel’s every melisma and flourish.
Aided by the Early Opera Company orchestra’s characterful playing under Christian Curnyn, Spirei’s staging likewise digs out all manner of musical illustration in Handel’s score, from an organ-accompanied drug high, to a cucumber sliced pointedly in rhythm. Much like the subversion of Pamphili’s moral lessons, it’s hardly what the piece’s creators had in mind – but all the more memorable for it.
• At Buxton international festival, Derbyhire, until 18 July
