You Might Say I Feel Like Radiation Man
Saturday night was opera night in the city, specifically for the Met's new production of Doctor Atomic by John Adams. Stu and I hopped the Metro North in the afternoon and, blearily, again late at night; Mandy and her new significant other met us there, although we got unfortunately little conversational time, in between their arriving late and our bolting during curtain calls to catch a cab back to Grand Central. The opera itself is striking, and it resists simple reactions.
Nate and I flew out to San Francisco in October '05 to see a show out of the first run (and to bike across the Golden Gate Bridge, and ride the streetcar to Fisherman's Wharf, etc. etc.), and we were both hit pretty hard with the music, which is rich and lush and shiny with mallet percussion, while being much darker and more expressionistic than Adams has ever been. The dramatic shape of the opera, really its whole theatrical M.O., is ambitious but seriously flawed, and there are some punishing slow spots in both acts. (In total it's three hours of music or so.) The cobbled-together libretto has much to do with this, but on a deeper level there's not that much actually going on -- sure, the A-bomb explosion, but no character development and no real tensions in the plot to resolve. As a series of choral or vocal settings taken in isolation it works -- I mean, better than works; several of these scenes are unforgettably absorbing -- but you have to take them spaced apart, and you'd better have an appetite for slow music too.
The new production is by Penny Woolcock, who created a very intriguing realist film adaptation of The Death of Klinghoffer a few years ago; her abstracted staging here is generally pretty sharp but starts to take on a throw-at-wall-see-what-sticks feeling in the second act. I think she does brilliantly with the concluding test scene, evoking very classily an abstract sense of urban destruction and also a feeling of time stopping, a theme that surfaces strongly toward the end. The original staging by the Adams's co-creator Peter Sellars (note: not Peter Sellers) had a maddening ending, with a realistic Gadget hanging above the stage even while it ostensibly was in the business of exploding -- I'm actually a huge literalist in my taste for opera stagings. (Woolcock also, appropriately, sealed Sellars's militarily clad ballet dancers into a box and shipped them back to 1944 c/o Jerome Robbins.) I never thought the ending of the opera would be able to work as well as it does here. Adams also substantially revised, to my memory, the explosion music, and I think for the better, but I can't remember what I heard in San Francisco now. At the climax a substrate of alienated clock-ticking sounds is subsumed under a flat, bone-rattling low electronic tone piped into the house. It's more of a physiological effect than a musical one, really, but I do think it works. If there's one thing the end of the opera does right it's that it creates a palpable sense of troubled disorientation.
Adams and Sellars's appetite for realistic detail, or at least an apparent documentary-grade legitimacy, misfires a little bit. They want to stay fairly true to the events of the test, but to me this jars with the liberty they take with the cast of characters, first and foremost in creating Oppenheimer's torment, but also in mocking up their moody Edward Teller and blustery General Leslie Groves. Scientific accuracy is another apparent fixation; Adams, since '05, has recast an opening chorus that once stated what he didn't realize was an out-of-date scientific truism, "Energy can be neither created nor destroyed," losing in the process a haunting melodic lilt.
Adams created the show with a necessity for electronic sound design, partly to integrate the electronic elements of the score, partly to achieve an ideal vocal and orchestral balance for its own sake. (His wildly successful 1999 oratorio El Niño has a subtle and usually unremarked upon sound design as well.) It does change the quality of the sound; from the Nosebleed Circle it's not a net loss, though it trades off some resonance for definition and makes the choral sections less atmospheric. That's a shame in that it leaches some sadness out of a couple of Act I scenes I'd remembered as very powerful. Now and then it would sound like a contrabass clarinet was playing thirty feet behind you. The sound is much better than at the San Francisco Opera, where it occasionally frayed or fuzzed.
Gerald Finley is extremely good as Oppenheimer; Thomas Glenn stands out with a delicate but powerful voice in the smaller role of Robert Wilson. Alan Gilbert made an excellent conductor of it all, and I hope he applies that talent to some more Adams when he's helming the New York Philharmonic.
YouTube has a fair number of clips (if abruptly excerpted) of a DVD made from a Dutch performance of the Sellars production; two of Finley's solo numbers are the ones not to miss, I think, the setting of John Donne's sonnet Batter My Heart, Three-Personed God that closes Act I, and an expansively eerie Baudelaire setting close to the end of Act II. For the Donne, a wrenchingly stately deploration weathering Stravinskian body blows; for the Baudelaire, shadow-filled open music spaces evoking a profound moral loneliness.
What's exciting about this opera to me is that I don't hear anyone else composing music that's this rich and complex and elusive while remaining so emotionally resonant. Theatrical cohesion could have lit this show up as an instant modern masterpiece, but I don't think you knock what you've got when it's this rare.
Nate and I flew out to San Francisco in October '05 to see a show out of the first run (and to bike across the Golden Gate Bridge, and ride the streetcar to Fisherman's Wharf, etc. etc.), and we were both hit pretty hard with the music, which is rich and lush and shiny with mallet percussion, while being much darker and more expressionistic than Adams has ever been. The dramatic shape of the opera, really its whole theatrical M.O., is ambitious but seriously flawed, and there are some punishing slow spots in both acts. (In total it's three hours of music or so.) The cobbled-together libretto has much to do with this, but on a deeper level there's not that much actually going on -- sure, the A-bomb explosion, but no character development and no real tensions in the plot to resolve. As a series of choral or vocal settings taken in isolation it works -- I mean, better than works; several of these scenes are unforgettably absorbing -- but you have to take them spaced apart, and you'd better have an appetite for slow music too.
The new production is by Penny Woolcock, who created a very intriguing realist film adaptation of The Death of Klinghoffer a few years ago; her abstracted staging here is generally pretty sharp but starts to take on a throw-at-wall-see-what-sticks feeling in the second act. I think she does brilliantly with the concluding test scene, evoking very classily an abstract sense of urban destruction and also a feeling of time stopping, a theme that surfaces strongly toward the end. The original staging by the Adams's co-creator Peter Sellars (note: not Peter Sellers) had a maddening ending, with a realistic Gadget hanging above the stage even while it ostensibly was in the business of exploding -- I'm actually a huge literalist in my taste for opera stagings. (Woolcock also, appropriately, sealed Sellars's militarily clad ballet dancers into a box and shipped them back to 1944 c/o Jerome Robbins.) I never thought the ending of the opera would be able to work as well as it does here. Adams also substantially revised, to my memory, the explosion music, and I think for the better, but I can't remember what I heard in San Francisco now. At the climax a substrate of alienated clock-ticking sounds is subsumed under a flat, bone-rattling low electronic tone piped into the house. It's more of a physiological effect than a musical one, really, but I do think it works. If there's one thing the end of the opera does right it's that it creates a palpable sense of troubled disorientation.
Adams and Sellars's appetite for realistic detail, or at least an apparent documentary-grade legitimacy, misfires a little bit. They want to stay fairly true to the events of the test, but to me this jars with the liberty they take with the cast of characters, first and foremost in creating Oppenheimer's torment, but also in mocking up their moody Edward Teller and blustery General Leslie Groves. Scientific accuracy is another apparent fixation; Adams, since '05, has recast an opening chorus that once stated what he didn't realize was an out-of-date scientific truism, "Energy can be neither created nor destroyed," losing in the process a haunting melodic lilt.
Adams created the show with a necessity for electronic sound design, partly to integrate the electronic elements of the score, partly to achieve an ideal vocal and orchestral balance for its own sake. (His wildly successful 1999 oratorio El Niño has a subtle and usually unremarked upon sound design as well.) It does change the quality of the sound; from the Nosebleed Circle it's not a net loss, though it trades off some resonance for definition and makes the choral sections less atmospheric. That's a shame in that it leaches some sadness out of a couple of Act I scenes I'd remembered as very powerful. Now and then it would sound like a contrabass clarinet was playing thirty feet behind you. The sound is much better than at the San Francisco Opera, where it occasionally frayed or fuzzed.
Gerald Finley is extremely good as Oppenheimer; Thomas Glenn stands out with a delicate but powerful voice in the smaller role of Robert Wilson. Alan Gilbert made an excellent conductor of it all, and I hope he applies that talent to some more Adams when he's helming the New York Philharmonic.
YouTube has a fair number of clips (if abruptly excerpted) of a DVD made from a Dutch performance of the Sellars production; two of Finley's solo numbers are the ones not to miss, I think, the setting of John Donne's sonnet Batter My Heart, Three-Personed God that closes Act I, and an expansively eerie Baudelaire setting close to the end of Act II. For the Donne, a wrenchingly stately deploration weathering Stravinskian body blows; for the Baudelaire, shadow-filled open music spaces evoking a profound moral loneliness.
What's exciting about this opera to me is that I don't hear anyone else composing music that's this rich and complex and elusive while remaining so emotionally resonant. Theatrical cohesion could have lit this show up as an instant modern masterpiece, but I don't think you knock what you've got when it's this rare.
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