For the ancient gods as for modern humans, vanity, jealousy and sexual impropriety were par for the course - and were hardly unknown in 1744, when Handel's bawdy opera-oratorio, Semele, offended religious sensibilities. Director Martin Constantine brings the supposedly archaic into sharp contemporary focus for a resurgent Mid Wales Opera; combining baroque specialist players the Academy of Ancient Music with young professional singers and students from the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama in an invigorating - sometimes quirkily comic - cautionary tale for the social media age.

Neon zigzags frame a (post-truth?) world in which visual artworks blur with kitsch; Arcadia is a rave, and Juno and Jupiter cult leaders. Semele pursues the god with naked lust, but her real fetish is narcissism; the craving for immortality revealed as addiction to self - and selfie - when strobe lightning becomes the flash of cameras, and crowds gape voyeuristically at phones and laptops.