THROUGHOUT VLADIMIR NABOKOV'S Lolita the prose chimes with music. How appropriate, then, that Rodion Schedrin, one of Russia's pre-eminent composers, has seized upon the novel for an opera. Schedrin's Lolita, which received its world premiere at the Royal Opera in Stockholm last month, runs four hours; unfortunately, the novel has more music on a single page.
Schedrin's lazy, impotent score is loutish when it is not downright sullen. The finale-in which the degenerate playwright Quilty scrambles around his mansion in a drugged stupor, stopping to pound out a few chords on his piano before Humbert Humbert (Per-Arne Wahlgren) shoots him-is a...