LOST HIGHWAY
4 - 11 April 2008
Conductor Baldur Brönnimann
Director Diane Paulus
Music Olga Neuwirth
Words Elfriede Jelinek and Olga Neuwirth
An English National Opera and Young Vic co-production
Click on the link below to hear Baldur Brönnimann discussing Lost Highway and other projects with Sandy Burnett:
In April 2008, Baldur Brönnimann conducted Olga Neuwirth’s Lost Highway with English National Opera at the Young Vic. Based on the 1997 film by David Lynch, this psychological thriller explores identity, dislocation and desire through the eyes of troubles jazz musician Fred Madison. This new production, a seething combination of sound and image, was directed by Diane Paulus. Lynch's deliciously dark and twisted world is brought to life by a mind-altering experience of sound, film and theatre: perfect for the modern, open performance space in the Young Vic Theatre.
Opening night reviews:
"... the performance, marking the start of this month's ENO-Young Vic collaboration, can hardly be faulted. The conductor Baldur Brönnimann controls the mix of live and electronically processed music seamlessly, just as the director Diane Paulus marshals the stage and video action in a slick production."
The Sunday Times, 13 April 2008
“So what of the score? Shreds of Carissimi slide languidly into half-heard lines from a Broadway standard, a Purcellian dying fall, Mahleresque cadences, generic jazz riffs from trumpet and sax, a yawn of slide guitar, skeletal stirrings of percussion, a sudden conflagration of knotted, humid bass, a pregnant wash of ambivalent, green-blue chords. In appropriating other people's songs, Neuwirth is backgrounding herself, but the minutely wrought joins and merges of live and recorded sound are themselves often mesmerising and were, under conductor Baldur Brönnimann and sound-designer Markus Noisternig, immaculately dovetailed.”
Independent on Sunday, 13 April 2008
"The music perfectly catches the mood of the original film. In fact, "Lost Highway" is so faithful to Lynch's original ... that one wonders if it would not have been more practical to just to show the film and have it accompanied by this wonderful orchestration (consummately handled by conductor Baldur Brönnimann and his 24-piece orchestra)."
Time Out, 10 April 2008
"Supplemented with guitar, accordion and pre-recorded audio feeds, the orchestra under the direction of Baldur Brönnimann, proves highly adept in producing the teeming, wheezy sounds of urban malaise, now and then stumbling woozily into distorted snatches of popular song before whirling back into the aural world of blood-steeped nighmare."
The London Paper, 9 April 2008
“Wander into the Young Vic for any one of the six sold-out performances and you'll find a living, breathing, hyperventilating evocation of Lynch's inner world. The great thing about Lost Highway – ENO's first collaborative show with the Young Vic – is that it refuses to conform to preconceived notions about music theatre; it isn't governed by rules as to when or where it might be appropriate to speak or sing...
The dialogue itself is hyper-amplified to take on the allusion of a movie soundtrack, while the band (under Baldur Brönnimann) create an extraordinary kind of emotional static – the musique concrète of Hades – that has absorbed the myriad musics of Lynch's world, from popular songs like "Unforgettable" to Kurt Weill's Threepenny Opera.”
The Independent, 8 April 2008
“The cast, led by Mark Bonnar and Quirijn de Lang as the two halves of the doppelganger hero, is good; the orchestra, under Baldur Brönnimann, is alert; and the staging by Diane Paulus assembles contemporary clichés without making them seem overly tired.”
Financial Times, 8 April 2008
“Lost Highway is based on the 1997 David Lynch film and endeavours to recreate the surreal, lurid, raunchy world of that psychological thriller. Fusing video, dialogue and music, both live (a 27-piece ensemble ably conducted by Baldur Brönnimann and pre-recorded electronics), Neuwirth captures the menace lurking round every corner.”
Evening Standard, 7 April 2008
"Baldur Brönnimann conducts with unfailing zest and panache – the 27-strong ensemble drawn from the ENO Orchestra responding with alacrity, and with the interplay of live and sampled instrumental sound ideally judged for this acoustic. Indeed, as an exemplar of what is possible within the domain of music-theatre, Lost Highway could hardly be improved upon: no-one interested in what such an endlessly re-inventive genre currently has to offer should miss seeing this astounding production.”
Classicalsource.com, April 2008
Other press interest in Lost Highway:
"While the New York Met joins the ranks of theatres picking up ENO shows, its artistic director John Berry is unveiling the fruits of a new collaboration with the Young Vic, the first of which puts David Lynch's film noir Lost Highway through an extraordinary theatrical reworking.
This is a film about what psychiatrists call "dissociative fugue", that stress-bred state in which a person unconsciously changes identity to escape some unbearable trauma; in this case, the guilt of a murderer.
Director Diane Paulus's production is set to a score by Olga Neuwirth, which has been lauded as challenging our perceptions of opera, and which in Paulus's view represents her biggest directorial challenge. "The piece is incredibly precise in terms of how it's scored," Paulus says, "with live orchestral music combined with electronic samples. In a conventional opera, the score gives the director a road map, but this is like walking on a high wire.
"Meanwhile, the film exists in people's memories – it wasn't a big hit, but among Lynch cult-heads it's often the No 1 film – and I'm having to juggle with what people will bring to the theatre in terms of their memories. I had to find a reason why people would want to see it live, because if you just want the two-dimensional experience, go see the movie."
This determined her set design – a highway cutting right through the audience, who will be seated in the round; a plexiglas box hanging above that highway, representing the house where the central characters live, with an Escher-like staircase descending; and 28 speakers to create a complex sound-system.
"It was actually inspired by Antony Gormley's box with vapour inside, in which you could disappear," Paulus says. "The show is really a private homage to him. It's theatre-as-installation, where the audience is part of the event. Brilliant to do at the Young Vic, impossible to do at the Coliseum."
The Independent, 20 March 2008
There are many films that seem to cry out for operatic treatment. Brief Encounter would make a good two-hander, or, if you wanted a grand love story with a chorus, Captain Corelli's Mandolin might do the trick. But, if there's one film director whose work defies the lyric stage point-blank, it must surely be David Lynch. There seems to be no purchase in his world of cold uncanny menace and weird obsessions for the warmth of the singing voice.
But that's not how it seems to Olga Neuwirth, whose musical version of Lost Highway has its British premiere in a joint English National Opera/Young Vic production next month.
"I've always loved David Lynch's films, ever since The Elephant Man," she says, "but there was something really special about Lost Highway." "Special" is one way of describing it - obscure and confusing might be another. Even Lynch's greatest fans have some trouble understanding its labyrinthine complexities. The film's first half is set in the strangely claustrophobic confines of an apartment, home to jazz musician Fred Madison and his wife Renée. Their passionless life is invaded by a sinister presence that delivers, unseen, intimate videos of their life to the couple's front door.
One of these shows the increasingly jealous Fred murdering Renée. But did he do it, or did he fantasise about doing it? And, when Fred mysteriously vanishes from the prison cell on Death Row, is the young garage-hand Pete who appears in his place a genuine double, or merely Fred's fantasy of the young virile man he'd like to be?
These ambiguities are precisely what fascinated Neuwirth. If any composer could possibly create a music-theatre version of Lynch's world, it would be this tiny, delicate but frighteningly intense Austrian composer.
Neuwirth is one of a new generation of talented Austrian composers who seem determined to bury the idea of Viennese music as nostalgic and ironic. Her pieces are not musical statements in the normal sense. They're more like vast bottomless soundscapes that summon up the unease and disorientation of modern life with uncomfortable vividness.
So it's not surprising that Lynch's film seemed a gift. "I love the way it plays with time," she says, "and the way you cannot tell what is reality and what is fantasy. This fits in with my view of music-theatre, because I don't want to represent things in a naturalistic way. I wanted to create an endless loop of time, with little phrases that recur again and again." What did Lynch himself think of her idea? "Oh, he was so supportive to me, and he's so open to all kinds of music."
What Neuwirth came up with is a vast soundscape in which the sound of 26 players and 11 singers and singing actors is mingled with video images and a synthesized soundtrack. Snatches of Kurt Weill and Magic Moments and Monteverdi add a further strangeness to the mix.
"I wanted to blur the boundaries, so that you don't know which sounds are real and which are coming from the speakers all round the auditorium," says Neuwirth. "It creates the effect of immersion in a kind of aural phantasmagoria."
The Daily Telegraph, 25 March 2008