Whiplash precision in even-handed meditation on Oppenheimer
Apacked auditorium greeted this concert staging of John Adams’s
Doctor Atomic with palpable respect as well as audible enthusiasm. At 70, the American composer – here conducting his own score with lithe energy and whiplash precision – has now been afforded the Grand Old Man status ironically fated to befall so many former mavericks and revolutionaries.
I’m a fan, but I doubt his third opera will rank among his finest works: Doctor Atomic is hobbled from the start by a peculiarly pretentious libretto clumsily sewn together by Adams’s regular collaborator Peter Sellars from poems, letters, memoirs and official documents after the original librettist Alice Goodman walked away.
Over the best part of three hours, it meditates on the case of J Robert Oppenheimer, the brilliant but conflicted scientist at the centre of the Manhattan Project to develop the nuclear bomb, culminating in the first test explosion in the New Mexican desert. The fundamental issues – science’s moral responsibilities, mankind’s capacity for self-destruction – could hardly be more immense.
Weirdly, however, despite the countdown factor, the narrative lacks real tension. It’s too earnest, too even-handed. The long dialogues between Oppenheimer and his colleagues, agonising about chain reactions of neutrons, the folks in Washington DC and the vagaries of the weather, meander on without any musical or dramatic purpose, and contrasting domestic scenes focused on Oppenheimer’s sensitive wife and the couple’s Native American nanny merely slow things up further.
A lot of philosophical and scientific hot air is expended in music that is frankly undistinguished – vocal lines that burble without lyricism, orchestration that isn’t much more inventive than that of the average Hollywood film score, and recourse to the tired minimalist trick of repeating short punchy themes faster, louder and harder as a means of raising the temperature.
It’s not all that bad: a chorus depicting a vision of the allconsuming god Vishnu has a fierce, barbaric splendour, and the hesitant yet impassioned setting of Donne’s sonnet Batter my heart, three person’d God, sung by Oppenheimer in his darkest hour, shows Adams at his very best.
But too much of the remainder seems to tread heavy water – even in a performance as committed as this, with the great Gerald Finley at the peak of his powers in the title role and excellent support from Brindley Sherratt, Julia Bullock, Jennifer Johnston, Andrew Staples and Marcus Farnsworth, as well as inexhaustible playing from the BBC Symphony Orchestra.