The thing about John Adams's music and operas, apart from their sheer brilliance, is that they grip you (me) from start to finish.
Very little happens in Doctor Atomic but the tension and drama never let up. I wish I could say something intelligent about the music, other than that there seemed to be a notable broadening of style in places but I don't have the knowledge of the vocabulary.
He certainly has a great sense of what works on stage. His operas are full of life, combining big ideas and very personal emotion.
I slightly missed having a truly original libretto here - Alice Goodman's words for Nixon and Klinghoffer are so outstanding - but this patchwork of poetry and science worked well.
And any quibbles seem irrelevant. Doctor Atomic is a huge and wonderful work, brilliantly performed and directed at ENO.
An understudy, James Cleverton, stepped into the very big shoes of Gerald Finley to play Oppenheimer - lovely voice, very natural on stage. Cheers from the audience at the end, but even bigger from the cast on stage after the post-bows curtain.
RSS Feed
