SUBTITLED IN ENGLISH, FRENCH, GERMAN
207 MINS • ALL REGIONS • NTSC 4:3 • COLOUR • L-PCM STEREO
Oratorio in three parts
Music George Frideric Handel
Libretto Thomas Morell
Director PETER SELLARS
Theodora DAWN UPSHAW
Didymus DAVID DANIELS
Valens FRODE OLSEN
Septimius RICHARD CROFT
Irene LORRAINE HUNT
Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment
Conductor WILLIAM CHRISTIE
For his 1996 Glyndebourne staging, radical American director Peter Sellars takes George Frideric Handel’s penultimate English oratorio – a tale of self-sacrificial love between a Christian virgin and a Roman imperial bodyguard in fourth-century, enemy-occupied Antioch – and, by resetting it in modern-day America, transforms it into a timeless parable of spiritual resistance to tyranny and persecution.
“It is great Handel singing, but then musically and dramatically this production is flawless” THE GUARDIAN
“As one profoundly beautiful aria followed another, the audience sat as if stunned” THE FINANCIAL TIMES
“William Christie and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment gave this wonderful music - the most transcendental in all Handel (one achingly introspective number after another) - all the room in the world” THE INDEPENDENT
Recorded live at Glyndebourne Festival Opera in June 1996