The relationship the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra has forged with the French conductor Emmanuelle Haïm is proving hugely fruitful. This realisation of Handel's Il Trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno, marking the 300th anniversary of its premiere, was a triumph.

The quality of Haïm's performances with her own baroque specialist group, Le Concert d'Astrée, is never less than impeccable. And her work here with a scaled-down CBSO produced exquisite sounds, underlining the musicianship of these players. Even more remarkable is the genius of the 22-year-old Handel; he eclipsed his contemporaries with the boldness and beauty of the writing for the four vocal soloists.

Opera was banned in the Rome of 1707, and Handel's setting of an allegorical oratorio shows exactly the pragmatism that characterised his later career, so that the dialogue between the figures of Beauty and Pleasure, Time and Enlightenment is by turns playful, profound and poignant. While the philosophical nature of Cardinal Pamphili's libretto, after Petrarch, is hardly straightforward, and Beauty's abandonment of pleasure in favour of spiritual fulfilment is not entirely convincing, the accumulating tensions were brilliantly sustained by Haïm. The singing of soprano Jaël Azzaretti, mezzos Ann Hallenberg and Romina Basso and tenor Carlo Allemano was of the highest order.

The infinite variety of the continuo colours and of the decorative elaboration of repreated material in the arias bore all the hallmarks of Haïm's exemplary practice. So, too, did her own accompaniments - not to mention the virtuoso organ sonata Handel incorporated for himself. Hallenberg's creamy yet agile mezzo, always deeply expressive, was outstanding. But the abiding memory of the evening will be the ravishing, timeless beauty of this music.