Tim Benjamin, The Fire of Olympus; or, On Sticking it to the Man (2019)

"Zeus is the all-powerful President of Olympus, undermined by activists led by the prankster Prometheus," explains Marquee, and based on that and the title, at first I thought it might turn out to be one of those obnoxiously smug, self-aware "deconstructions" of well-known stories à la Shrek.  It's nothing like that, though.  It's really much more interesting.

So yeah, Zeus is some kind of dictator or quasi-dictator, assisted by his personal assistant Pandora and his torturer/secret police chief Hephaestus (done up in a VERY nazi-esque costume here).  Pro- and Epimetheus are raiding Olympus headquarters, and they stumbled onto this fire thing.  Epimetheus escapes with it while his brother is captured.

Probably no need to spoil it beyond that.  You can't really make one-on-one parallels between this and current events, but it would be naive to imagine that it wasn't at least inspired by the terrible political goings on in much of the world today.  There aren't many specifics as to what Zeus' tyrannical rule means (although he does declare "Olympus for Olympians" at one point), but you can't expect an opera to be super-detailed meditation on oppression.  Still, it does an okay job of depicting power and the resistance thereto.  It's certainly intriguing.

But maybe more interesting than the specifics of the story is the music, which I must call neobaroque.  It's clearly going for that Handelian feel.  And it doesn't do a half-bad job at that; if it's not quite on the level of Handel himself, well, that's no shame.  It's fun, and there are some good arias, which I appreciate, these being so often absent from contemporary operas.  It's just too bad that he didn't go so far as to include any castrato/countertenor roles (though both Methei are sung by women).  

You do have to wonder what story purpose this serves, though: we're clearly meant to think of baroque depictions of Greek gods (Semele seems like the most obvious touchstone), but the story as presented here really does evoke such things.  Well, I suppose "it's fun" is really all the justification you need.

This sort of came out of nowhere, and then I enjoyed it a lot.  It's always fun when that happens.