It isn’t every day that an opera house opens its doors for the first time. Hardly surprising, then, that the impressive new Landestheater Linz should aim high for its opening event in April 2013 by commissioning a new opera by Philip Glass, and assembling for this purpose a stellar creative team that included Rainer Mennicken (libretto), David Pountney (stage direction) and Amir Hosseinpour (choreography) alongside conductor Dennis Russell Davies and the Bruckner Orchester Linz. The result, a large-scale three-act opera, is captured here on both disc and DVD. Based on a play by Peter Handke, The Lost is an ambitious attempt to synthesise old and new by combining music, drama, dance and ballet with more recent multimedia forms, such as video and film on a grand scale.

The result is a kind of postmodern Gesamtkunstwerk. The plot (such as it is) includes a narrator who emerges from the auditorium at the beginning of the opera and whose role only becomes clear at the end, a Jerry Springer-style talk show fracas acted out onstage and projected on to a large video wall, world war and its post-apocalyptic consequence, a naked dancer, a number of biblical, mythological and fictional characters, and a large cast of children, actors and extras who drift in and out of the action at various times.

At one point in Act 3, the Protagonist (sung by Peter Pertusini) proclaims ‘Ich bin verloren / Wir sind verloren’ (‘I am lost / We are all lost’), and by this stage it would be difficult not to disagree. Spuren der Verirrten is a complex, multilayered, diffuse, bewildering and occasionally frustrating opera. The sense of confusion appears to permeate the entire production, and Glass cuts a rather isolated figure in the accompanying ‘making of’ bonus film on the DVD, which relays the cast’s trials and tribulations in the countdown to the first performance.

It would be easy, however, to emphasise the flaws in a project of such grand designs; but that would be to diminish a work that has moments of genuine creativity. The choreography is both impressively conceived by Hosseinpour and brilliantly executed by his dance ensemble, and the ending presents a clever theatrical reversal by placing the entire orchestra onstage and the cast miming their performance in the pit. Glass is also forced out of his comfort zone at times, such as in Act 2, which features an improvisational trio of drum kit, bass guitar and oboe, but nevertheless reverts to type for the rousing final grand chorus.