The recent recording of New Zealand Opera’s production of Handel’s Semele is unusual in several ways. First, the basis of the film is a performance in the Holy Trinity Cathedral in Auckland which leads to rather disturbing (depending on your taste I suppose) juxtapositions such as Jupiter and Semele on a bed in front of the High Altar making out like rabid weasels. The setting also makes it very hard to film because the audience is sitting in the pews and the action happens in various places in and around the audience which makes it nigh impossible for the film director to show us what the live audience saw.
Yggdrasil is a new record by the Norwegian women’s choir Cantus conducted by Tove Ramlo-Ystad. There are eleven works on the record by various composers and all inspired, more or less loosely. by the idea of the World Ash Tree of Norse legend. Sometimes they are a fairly literal telling of some episode from myth, other times they explore broader ideas around a tree that lasts for a long time, but not for ever, and contains within it its own destruction and the seed of its rebirth. So, themes of humanity and Earth’s place in the Cosmos, the destructiveness of war, greed and climate change all have their place.
operaramblings 