I'm not sure what possessed YouTube user Gazdatronik to pair the 1928 cartoon Felix the Cat Woos Whoopie with the suite from Karl-Birger Blomdahl's 1959 space opera Aniara, but it's an arresting combination. I revisited my CDs of Aniara after reading Lisa Hirsch's enjoyable Fantasy Opera Season posts. Blomdahl was perhaps the most formidable of twentieth-century Swedish composers, and Aniara, which tells of refugees from a ravaged Earth drifting in space, is a wildly inventive, at times prophetically psychedelic score; the Daisi Doody dance music in Act I is one obvious highpoint. (Blomdahl adopted a similar style in the orgiastic finale of his ballet Sisyphus.) I'd have to think about my own fantasy season — operas you've been waiting to see live — but it would certainly include a double bill of Weill's The Tsar Has His Himself Photographed and Nono's Intolleranza 1960, and also Schreker's Christophorus.
