Nonetheless, like the real-life Oppenheimer, you might prefer to leave after Act I. It's worth seeing Doctor Atomic for "Batter my heart" alone. Though superlatively performed by the cast, chorus and orchestra under conductor Lawrence Renes, this is a fascinating failure: less nuanced and disciplined than Klinghoffer, less theatrical than Nixon (both written with Alice Goodman), less fluid and focused than El Niño or A Flowering Tree (both developed with Sellars). (Adams refrains from attempting to represent the conflagration directly.) Of the scientist who built it, Gerald Finley's wracked performance of John Donne's Holy Sonnet XIV at the end of Act I gives you more information than the rest of librettist Peter Sellars' syntactically baffling collage of poetry, memoirs and declassified military files.Īdams delivers the goods tirelessly – a blazing chorus from the Bhagavad Gita, a Debussian wash of sensuality for Kitty and Oppenheimer's Baudelaire and Rukeyser love duet, a rolling electric storm – but he cannot lend Sellars's untidy text real urgency. Of the bomb itself, all you need to know can be heard in the closing tape of a Japanese woman quietly asking for water for her children. Is Doctor Atomic another? Scored for tectonic plates of brass, hissing strings, rapt cascades of tuned percussion, hot, darting flutes and shuddering electronica, John Adams's re-imagining of the storm-struck night before J Robert Oppenheimer's creation first exploded is part triumph, part disaster: an excruciating countdown that climaxes long before detonation. History is littered with one-aria operas. But for eight glorious minutes it's just one man and his gadget and the first great operatic aria of the 21st century: "Batter my heart, three-person'd God". Then there's the wise-ass side-kick, the dumb-ass general, the kid with a conscience, the weatherman, the local hired help and several hundred soldiers, scientists and secretaries. ![]() ![]() Somewhere nearby is a sympathetic woman who likes a drink, knows her place, and can quote verse too. Alone and chain-smoking, its trilby-hatted creator rages against fate in the words of a poet who knew more than most about doubt and compromise. Dark and distended with potential, the A-bomb hangs like an anti-moon in the desert night.
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