Nonesuch assembled a fine cast for this recording, made in conjunction with a series of performances conducted by the composer at London’s Barbican. Besides the Donne setting there are proper set pieces for both Kitty and Pasqualita. Sometimes it’s incredibly subtle, like raindrops and running water during Pasqualita’s first aria. Sometimes this is dramatic and in your face, as in the opening of each act. There are the usual Adams pulsing rhythms and sheer energy but here they are integrated with recorded sounds engines, propellers, rainfall, etc. The tension builds right up to the moment of detonation where, in a final and devastating coup de theatre, not only matter, but time and space, disintegrate and we find ourselves no longer in New Mexico but in the rubble of Hiroshima. Oppenheimer increasingly retreats into an inner world, Teller survives through black humour and at the Oppenheimer home Kitty Oppenheimer turns to poetry to convey longing for peace, while the Tiwa maid, Pasqualita, expresses increasing distress at the desecration of her people’s land in the language of dreams. That said, the interplay of themes and moods –the morality of the project (indeed of nuclear science), the “world of men” versus domesticity, bureaucratic doggedness – play out effectively and the act closes with the one real vocal show stopper in the piece a blistering setting of John Donne’s “Batter my heart, three-personed God”.Īct 2 really starts to build the tension as the countdown to the test continues in deteriorating weather. Much of Act 1 is scene setting at Los Alamos and at times the libretto, largely drawn from archive sources by Sellars, is prosy and has one wishing that Alice Goodman had taken on the project. There are definite advantages to having the music without the distraction of the visuals. So little in fact that Peter Sellars staged the original production rather the way he stages oratorios with lots of stylized movement by the chorus and the introduction of dancers. There’s very little action in the stage version. I think this is because, in essence, it’s more oratorio than opera. John Adams’ 2005 opera Doctor Atomic, about the development of the first atomic weapon, comes over very effectively on CD.
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