Opera Chic

David Lynch + Opera = Forever Awesome

Every night when OC goes to bed in Eres lace and linen Bellora, she says a little prayer that one day David Lynch will bring his avant-garde ideas (and hair) to opera. We always said that he'd be a perfect fit, especially after his The Air is On Fire exhibition that we caught in Milan a while back.

Recently, the American genius was in Catania, Italy for a local benefit and wanted to visit the city's opera house after hearing that it was one of the most gorgeous in Italy.

During the informal visit to Catania's Teatro Massimo Bellini, Lynch told intendant Rita Gari Cinquegrana (above), "When I decided to direct an opera, I'd really like to do it in this theater."

As OC wrote a while back, we'd love to see a Lynchian Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth. And there's this: "Opera Chic doesn't see why a smart, cool opera house should not commission him an opera staging."

David Lynch's Strauss

David Lynch on KCRW:

I’m going to go to Richard Strauss. We’re getting into long haired stuff now. I was in a really swank Mercedes Benz in Germany one night. Black, deep black and snow flakes the size of silver dollars coming down. And I'd been left in the car -- I forget who I was with but they had gone into a building and I had been left in the car -- and I turned on the radio and I heard this thing. And it thrilled my soul. This particular piece of music at that particular time, I saw in my minds eye, my four year old son coming down a flight of stairs and it made me start crying.

Opera Chic's favorite Im Abendrot?

All due respect to Renée's choice of Schwarzkopf, but by far Lisa Della Casa's "Vier Letze Lieder" is the closest to Opera Chic's heart. It's not on YouTube, but La Jessye is.

And she does thrill your soul, too.

Menace, Mayhem, And Bewbs: Lost Highway Bares It All In London

There seem to be problems with the London staging of the opera written by Olga Neuwirth and kinky Nobel girl Elfriede Jelinkek on the basis of David Lynch's Lost Highway. Among the problems, something we'd never thought could hurt: too many bewbs.

You can have too much of a good thing. Valerie MacCarthy, the lissome soprano singing the female lead in ``Lost Highway,'' frequently bares her breasts during the London performance. Each time, there's less sexual and dramatic charge. It's an old adage but a true one: less is more.

This is, in fact, weirdykinz:

One of the many explicit sex scenes deploys the instrumental forces to fine effect — a mouth organ making an eloquent contribution.

And Ruperto in the Telegraph seems to be in full blown killjoy mode:

"Immaculate staging lost in pretension"

We still fully support the effort to add more bewbs to opera.

David Lynch @ Fondation Cartier: The Air Is On Fire

When Opera Chic is finally given her dream job -- sovrintendente at La Scala -- she'll immediately call her favorite Opera Director Who Hasn't Directed An Opera Yet, ie David Lynch, and give him carte blanche to èpater the superboring world of opera with his visions of darkness and beauty.

For the time being, she'll have to make a reservation at the Crillon for a quick Paris trip soon in order to check out David Lynch's  The Air Is On Fire, the art show that opens on Saturday at the Cartier Foundation. 

David Lynch's Lost Highway Becomes an Opera

OK, this is officially scary: a couple weeks ago Opera Chic wrote a post about David Lynch, pointing out how awesome it'd be if he directed an opera, with his dark icky strange genius sensibility
.

Today we have discovered that one of his films, the badly underrated Lost Highway (link NSFW: Opera Chic owns a very chic Region-2 French DVD of it) has become an opera.

Photo album of the opera is here (scroll down). Libretto by scandalicious Nobel Prize Laureate Elfriede Jelinek, who already made classical music really icky in her book The Piano Teacher (Michael Haneke's supercreepo film is an OC favorite).

David Lynch, Opera Director

Earlier today, Opera Chic was watching the fascinatingly incomprehensible INLAND EMPIRE, David Lynch's new film, and while immersed in Laura Dern's rabbit-intensive nightmares she found herself thinking about something Shostakovich wrote about Lady Macbeth of Mtsenk (btw, if you haven't already, check out the lean, mean, terrifying literary source): "I feel empathy for her... She is surrounded by monsters".

Maybe it was the glum, industrial sets Lynch found in Poland, or the interesting bluish light that he used to drench the scariest moments of the film (there are a lot), or maybe it was Opera Chic's strictly Platonic crush on Lynch ("strictly" because, seriously, DL is a genius and lives in a Lloyd Wright (FLW's son) house and all...but he's sixty and smokes like a chimney and he's a big Weirdy McWeirdykins to boot!), but Opera Chic realized that Lynch would make a great opera director.

And he'd be especially awesome with Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth -- he'd give the opera the perfect tone of menace and nightmare. Lynch paints and takes photographs and writes music and he's already directed tons of ads, and choreographed a superlame Julee Cruise video. Opera Chic doesn't see why a smart, cool opera house should not commission him an opera staging. After all, don't we all complain that opera directors have few ideas? At least this man has A LOT of ideas. Some of them even good!

+++++ UPDATE1+++++

Aaron Hillis, film critic and scholar and NYC blogger, calls INLAND EMPIRE his favorite feature of 2006, and reviews creepy DL oldie Eraserhead

++++++ UPDATE2+++++

The Evening Class went to a DL lecture

++++++++UPDATE3++++++++

I was in Łódź, Poland. It's spelled L-O-D-Z, but it's pronounced "Wootch."