The Star-Ledger's Bradley Bambarger calls Doctor Atomic "an elegy on the end of American innocence," one that "has struck a chord exceedingly rare for a contemporary opera, even considering Adams' standing as the nation's signature composer." This is the opera’s hit single, and its power comes from sweeping away the cluttered rattle of building, calculating, fretting, and arguing." The melody sighs, slides, and recovers by leaps, only to roll back gently into exalted gloom. Of the new production, the writer lauds conductor Alan Gilbert, making his Met debut, and his "gift for seeing the lucid core in mountains of complex detail," through which "he reveals a score of microscopic clarity and panoramic sweep."ĭavidson's admiration for Adams's compositional skills is such that he imagines "Adams could set a Chinese-takeout menu to music without sacrificing lyric fluency." Much grander than that text is John Donne's poem "Batter My Heart," which Gerald Finley sings as Oppenheimer, "set to music that recalls a lament by Henry Purcell. New York magazine's Justin Davidson says that, with the "darkly riveting" Doctor Atomic, "Adams has written his finest work." The premiere of the opera's first production, directed by its librettist, Peter Sellars, at the San Francisco Opera House in 2005, left Davidson "bewitched." The opera tells the story of the creation of the atomic bomb and the man behind the project, J. John Adams's 2005 opera Doctor Atomic received its Metropolitan Opera premiere last week with a new staging by British film direction Penny Woolcock ( The Death of Klinghoffer, 2003), and continues with further performances through early November.
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