French critics: ‘Fly’ needs help

Film composer Howard Shore’s first opera, an adaptation of David Cronenberg’s 1986 horror flick “The Fly,” will not open in L.A. for two months, but the buzz is not good.

In fact, French critics mostly took swats at the work, which features a libretto by David Henry Hwang and direction by Cronenberg, after it opened July 2 at Paris’ Theatre du Chatelet under the baton of Los Angeles Opera general director Placido Domingo. A co-production with L.A. Opera, it will receive its U.S. premiere with six performances at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion beginning Sept. 7.

“At the intermission, an hour into the two-hour show, one is already so bored as to strongly suspect the presence of the parasitical tsetse fly,” wrote Le Figaro critic Christian Merlin. Lead singers “Daniel Okulitch and Ruxandra Donose inhabit their roles with a highly charged emotional fervor that is inversely proportional to the quality of the music they are defending.”

“Shore is not [film and opera composer] Erich Korngold,” Renaud Machart commented in Le Monde. “The result sounds dutiful, unimaginatively orchestrated, often covering the voices, as by a moderately gifted pupil of Arnold Schoenberg.”

Opined Eric Dahan in the daily Liberation: “With the exception of some impressive musical nuances and sound effects, Shore has as much difficulty with the orchestration as with the rhythm.”

-- Chris Pasles