How do you recreate the shock of Handel’s Semele – the musical drama that sent a scandalous frisson through London in 1744, giving an audience expecting ‘wholesome Lenten bread’ instead ‘a glittering stone dug from the ruins of Greek mythology’ (as Winton Dean so memorably has it) – for an unshockable contemporary audience? How about staging it in a cathedral, complete with vodka bar and romping on the high altar?

Directors Thomas de Mallet Burgess and Jacqueline Coats lean heavily into the composer’s blurred world of Italian-opera-meets-English-oratorio, working the friction between context and content, expectation and execution to their advantage in this playful 2020 production for New Zealand Opera.

Staged in Auckland’s Holy Trinity Cathedral, their modern-dress Semele opens as site-specific theatre. The audience become guests at the high-society wedding of Semele and Athamas, the chorus a robed-and-ruffed choir, Ino a reluctant bridesmaid. When Jove’s thunderclap interrupts the score it lands instead as a roar of motorcycles, pulling up outside ready to whisk Semele away. Even those of us watching digitally are invited in, as the footage slips between conventional filming and live wedding videography. It’s fun and witty, if only the issues of acoustic balance and ambient noise had been more satisfactorily resolved.

As it is, on DVD this feels more like an aide-memoire of a performance than a fully realised experience. If the concept, along with Tracy Grant Lord’s designs and Jo Kilgour’s colour-saturated, jewel-toned lighting are the highlights, then the music is much more of an uncertain quantity. Peter Walls conducts a rather pallid New Zealand Opera Baroque Orchestra. You’d swear these were modern strings, so lacking in texture or depth is their tone. Choruses are often performed on the move, lurching in and out of focus along with the tuning.

The soloists are more interesting. Amitai Pati is the pick of the bunch. The Samoan tenor (one third of Sol3 Mio) is an outstanding Jupiter, bright-toned and full-voiced, lyrical lines anchored by enough weight to make this reluctant smiter believable as both lover and thug. There’s nothing fey about his ‘Where’er you walk’, which paints a seductive picture anyone would want to fall for, and his dawning horror through the final act is well judged.

Emma Pearson’s Semele gamely pouts and romps, but musically is much more convincing as tragic heroine than vapid good-time girl. ‘Myself I shall adore’ is earthbound rather than ecstatic but there’s some efficient coloratura in ‘No, no, I’ll take no less’. Her warm, slightly grainy soprano doesn’t quite supply the necessary contrast with Sarah Castle’s stylish Juno/Ino, supported by Chelsea Dolman as a fresh, blossomy Iris. Paul Whelan’s Cadmus/Somnus is a treat, bringing the best of both bass and baritone to the contrasting roles.