Fifty Nine Productions Ltd.

About the project

Collaborating with set designer Tom Pye, Leo Warner (Fifty Nine Productions) will design the video and projection elements of this ambitious new staging of Handel's masterpiece at English National Opera in November 2009.

SELECTED REVIEWS

'The vogue for staging oratorios and song-cycles continues. I can’t help feeling that composers knew what they were doing by keeping things out of the theatre, but this prejudice aside, Deborah Warner’s generous-hearted vision of Handel’s Messiah ranks as one of the more persuasive examples of the practice.

It happens in the here-and-now, against a panorama of modern urban life, conveyed through the clean, spare and often very beautiful designs (including video) of Tom Pye, Leo Warner, Lysander Ashton, Moritz Junge and Jean Kalman.'

**** Daily Telegraph

'Handel’s Messiah, with its Christian pageantry and Hallelujah Chorus, for which audiences still stand following the example of an 18th-century monarch, is, for better or worse, part of the national fabric. Deborah Warner’s staging for ENO is a courageous attempt, successful in part, to retrieve the work from the religionists and traditionalists and discover its universal dimension.'

*** Evening Standard