Olga Neuwirth, Lost Highway/Lost Highway Suite

[humprof]

Last weekend, ICE (the International Contemporary Ensemble), which has done some fantastic surround recordings for Sono Luminus, performed Olga Neuwirth's "mostly wordless" suite adapted from her 2003 opera, Lost Highway--itself an adaptation of the David Lynch film of the same name--at Empac, the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center in Troy, New York. The Center has a unique, 64-speaker dome "surround" sound system, and Seth Colter Walls's review of the performance in the print edition of the New York Times was entitled "One Lost Highway, but, Oh, Those 64 Speakers":

The instrumental suite, lasting approximately 40 minutes, requires live electronic processing of six soloists, drawn from a larger chamber ensemble, here the International Contemporary Ensemble.

Pumping out those multichannel electronics is a job that might normally be handled by just a few speakers. (The CD version of the full opera was mixed for 5.1 surround sound systems.) Empac’s 64-speaker dome — which made a vivid impression at its Spatial Audio Workshop last year — works at another level of density. Unlike movie-theater systems, in which the directionality of a spatially separated mix is always broadly perceptible, an “ambisonic” array like this one can have a hypnotic, hard-to-track power that ideally suits this Lynchian work.

I'm assuming that if any of you upstate New York QQ'ers had attended this performance, we'd have heard about it by now. But has anyone heard the recording of the full opera? It's currently out of stock at Presto Classical, although Big River has it.

 

[humprof]

Still hoping for a recording with an Atmos mix of that Lost Highway Suite. In the meantime: Neuwirth just won the Grawemeyer Award (former winners include Pierre Boulez and John Luther Adams) for her latest opera Orlando, so maybe that'll get a big label's attention...
https://www.npr.org/sections/decept...61756707/olga-neuwirth-grawemeyer-music-award