You could say that multimedia was invented in Paris between the wars, when artists as diverse as Picasso, Stravinsky, Cocteau and Satie began pouring their ideas into a melting pot stirred by Diaghilev. Amaze Me! (a command Diaghilev once issued to Cocteau) is the title of a mini-season produced by Opera North inspired by the artistic buzz of the Parisian avant-garde in the 1920s and 1930s. The season includes a ballet that is also an opera, an opera that is also an oratorio and an interval that is really an invitation to explore the avant-garde cinema and cabaret turns in the foyers outside.
Such mix-and-match programming is an ideal way to air works that are too short, surreal or difficult for frequent performance. Ravel's one-act opera, L'Enfant et les Sortileges (The Child and the Spells), for example, demands huge resources for a piece that is brief, barmy and, in the final analysis, not very good.
Colette's text tells the original Toy Story, in which the occupants of a child's nursery spring to life. Though the music is often trite, the weirdness suits the playful vision of director-designer Nigel Lowery well. There is an exceptional performance from Claire Wild, who transforms childish tantrums into mellifluous vocalising, and plenty of Amir Hosseinpour's trademark mosquito-swatting choreography, more of which can be seen in the brilliantly jittery reworking of Stravinsky's Petrushka.
There was more shattering Stravinsky in the concert performance of the opera-oratorio Oedipus Rex, given at Leeds Town Hall. No one has ever been sure what Stravinsky meant by an "opera-oratorio"; director Charles Edwards's solution is a production that sets out as one thing and becomes another. To begin with we are in the oratorio territory of solemn faces and bow ties, but soon the staging loosens up and finally springs apart to mirror Oedipus's fall from authority to exile and the disintegration of civic order in Thebes. The experience of Stuart Skelton's excellently sung, eyeless Oedipus staggering off the stage caused more than one member of the audience to recoil.
· Ends tonight. Box office: 0113-222 6222. Then touring to Manchester, Nottingham and Newcastle.
