Oedipus Rex was conceived as an opera without drama or movement, in which the narrator gives the game away before the events are depicted on stage. Small wonder that it tends to work most readily in concert. Undaunted, Julie Taymor flings everything at it: archetypes from Japanese cinema, aboriginal performance traditions, ballet, puppetry and mask theatre. This celebrated 1992 production ought to look cluttered yet it works in much the same way as her subsequent magnum opus, The Lion King.

While it’s possible to imagine more driven conducting, the ensemble is well drilled and the cast unbeatable. Old hands will recall that Ozawa’s CD version retains Jessye Norman’s imperious Jocasta and Bryn Terfel’s youthful Creon (Philips, 3/94 – nla). Norman’s slightly flat intonation may bother some but she looks as well as sounds unforgettable on the DVD, and it helps to have Philip Langridge, in fresher voice than Peter Schreier, thinking through his predicament in close-up. I know of no better introduction to a work memorably traduced by Prokofiev as follows: ‘The libretto is French, the text is Latin, the subject is Greek, the music is Anglo-German (Handel) and the money is American – true cosmopolitanism!’ Perhaps it’s been a little Japanese since 1992.

Long a party piece for Sir Simon Rattle in Birmingham, The Rite of Spring has assumed totemic status in Berlin, too. It has been deployed in an outreach community dance project as well as providing live musical accompaniment to Oliver Herrmann’s experimental silent movie at the Berlin Film Festival. The director has nothing to say about Diaghilev’s ballet; his theme is our contemporary longing for a ritual to heal our fears. Viewed as playthings of a faceless God (the deity would seem to be a black woman working in her kitchen), the ‘plot’ concerns three protagonists from post-spiritual western Europe and their transformative contact with an ecumenical variant of the Santeria faith of the Caribbean.

Herrmann fell into a diabetic coma only days before completing this defiantly oblique, postmodern artefact. Replete with visual tricks, it has garnered posthumous acclaim for a photographer and film-maker known to music lovers through his collaborations with his wife, the soprano Christine Schäfer.