11 performance.) The pit was crammed with 71 players, including a fearsome array of percussion, to negotiate Adams' score under conductor Donald Runnicles.īut there's also something maddening about Doctor Atomic, which is guaranteed a long life because of Adams' stature as America's most popular living composer. (Performances continue through Saturday this report is from the Oct. Especially from an orchestral standpoint, it's almost physical in its impact. Looming above the singer was the bomb, a spiky sphere suspended from scaffolding, draped in a shroud.Īs a musical experience _ a sensory experience _ Doctor Atomic is awesome. His opera The Flowering Tree, at the Jazz at Lincoln Center facility in 2009, was so flat-out beautiful I have yet to recover.In a characteristically arty touch, Oppenheimer named the nuclear test site in New Mexico's high desert Trinity, after the Donne poem. Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain,ĭivorce me, untie, or break that knot again,Įxcept you enthrall me, never shall be free,Īdams’ Nixon in China will be the next Metropolitan Opera HD broadcast, on Saturday, 2/12. Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,īut is captived, and proves weak or untrue. Your force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new. That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend Atomic (about Robert Oppenheimer and the setting off of the first atomic bomb):īatter my heart, three-person’d God for youĪs yet but knock breathe, shine, and seek to mend John Donne’s plea in Holy Sonnet XIV that grace will break his captive will, set to necessarily inadequate but characteristically gorgeous music by John Adams and sung by bass-baritone Gerald Finley in the Adams opera Dr. Mockingbird’s resident opera aficionado Ken Wilson offers forth a truly breathtaking moment of beauty:
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