Opera has a champion in David Hockney – just at its moment of need. While London’s opera houses fight for their existence against a hostile arts council, Hockney gives a demonstration of how democratic an art form it is by driving through California with Wagner blaring out, each bend in the mountain road timed to the music’s unfurling sublimity. And you feel as if you are in the open-top car with him, as a film of this joyous stunt is projected on to the deep, wide walls and floor of the Lightroom in London, with sound embracing you like the waters of a Hockney pool.
Opera is not only prominent in this new audiovisual venue’s attempt to give a living artist the “immersive” digital treatment previously meted out to such dead heroes as Van Gogh and Kahlo, but a metaphor of what Hockney might be hoping it achieves. For this patient painter of faces and places is also, we’re reminded, a lover of sensory spectacle with a deeply Romantic side. One of the best sections of the show revisits the chromatically brilliant, wittily postmodernist opera and ballet designs he painted in the 1970s and 80s. Animated figures on his painted sets for Wagner’s Tristan overture make this bit feel like Hockney’s tribute to Disney’s Fantasia – a humorous touch of knowing kitsch.
