Sunday, February 25, 2007

"Lost Highway" opera.

...Lost Highway opera?

Missing from “Lost Highway” the opera was Mr. Lynch’s sense of spaciousness and relative quiet: the time for events to breathe and unfold. His great movie does not yell at us as does Ms. Neuwirth’s opera. Its anguishes are subterranean, more to be inferred from what is seen than transmitted through electronically bloated shrieks and groans. Music, for all its idiosyncratic power, may be too concrete and ultimately too blatant to adequately translate Mr. Lynch’s indirections. Yelling, on the other hand, is an art form like any other, and Ms. Neuwirth’s “Lost Highway” yells admirably. I would have admired it even more if, for just an hour and a half, I could have forgotten David Lynch ever existed.

Dick Laurant is spinning in his grave.

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