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John Adams: Doctor Atomic (DVD)
Winner of the Best DVD (Opera/Ballet) in the 2009 Midem Awards
Included in Alex Ross’ The Ten Best Classical-Music Recordings of 2008
The New Yorker, 11 December 2008
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/tny/2008/12/alex-rosss-ten-best-recordings.html
Composer: John Adams
Performers:
· J. Robert Oppenheimer: Gerald Finley
· Kitty Oppenheimer: Jessica Rivera
· General Leslie Groves: Eric Owens
· Edward Teller: Richard Paul Fink
· Jack Hubbard: James Maddalena
· Robert Wilson: Thomas Glenn
· Captain James Nolan: Jay Hunter Morris
· Pasqualita: Ellen Rabiner
· Chorus of De Nederlandse Opera
· Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra
· Musical Director: Lawrence Renes
· Stage Director: Peter Sellars
Recorded live at Het Musiektheater, Amsterdam on 7th, 25th & 29th June 2007.
Release date: 1 August 2008 (UK)
No of Discs: 2
Label: Opus Arte, Cat No. OA0998D
Format: All Formats
Regions: All Regions
Picture format: 16:9
Length: 288 Mins
Sound: DTS Surround 5.1 / 2.0 Dolby Digital
Subtitles: EN/FR/DE/ES/NE
Plus
· Interview with Peter Sellars.
· Illustrated synopsis & cast gallery.
From the Opus Arte website
http://www.opusarte.com/pages/product.asp?ProductID=248
The longing to overcome human boundaries lead the physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer to begin an experiment that formed a threat to the whole of humanity, and whose scientific results still do today. The question of the moral implications of the atomic bomb is raised in John Adams’ opera, just as much as that of the influence on the private lives of the main characters. Doctor Atomic is the fifth work to result from almost twenty years of collaboration between the American composer and his fellow American director and Erasmus Prize-winner Peter Sellars.
Winner of the Best DVD category at the Midem Classical Awards 2009
http://www.midemclassicalawards.com/node/410
What the critics say
Geoff Brown, The Times, 1 August 2008
John Adams’s opera Doctor Atomic, approaching its third birthday, is arriving in Britain in stages. Last year’s Proms hosted the premiere of a symphonic potpourri. Now we get a DVD of Peter Sellars’s original staging, as performed last summer at Netherlands Opera. The real thing arrives at English National Opera next February, in a staging by Penny Woolcock. Britain gets there eventually.
Doctor Atomic is a big, serious piece: rightly so, when the topic’s the first atom bomb test in 1945. Adams’s score is strong on atmosphere and gesture (grinding sci-fi dissonances, nighttime anguish), but weaker on lyrical flights that might give vent to the feelings bubbling inside J. Robert Oppenheimer (Gerald Finley) and the drama’s other players. And if Adams’s notes don’t cramp their style, Sellars’s text, a mix of official quotations, poetry, and waffle, often will. Even Puccini would falter over a line such as “I keep in constant touch with a team of psychiatrists at Oak Ridge.”
The big exception is Oppenheimer’s Batter my heart, three-person’d God, a baroque-flavoured aria of torment obviously inspired by Lorraine Hunt Lieberson’s anguished arias in past Sellars productions. That is a terrific, moving sequence.
The heart throbs too in scenes featuring Jessica Rivera as Oppenheimer’s wife, the opera’s symbol of warmth, sensuousness, and hope. But these are moments: the overall tone stays cool, intellectual. We watch as observers, not participants.
Sellars directed this TV version himself. There are virtues here, and vices. Cinema aficionados dismayed by static shots may revel in the nervous visuals, the quick editing and close-ups (you grow very familiar with Rivera’s tongue). But by fidgeting so much, Sellars the film director often works against the interests of Sellars the stage director. Body movements are truncated; the patterns of Lucinda Childs’s choreography get lost. All too rarely do we grasp the big picture and enjoy the full impact of Adrianne Lobel’s stark sets, with desert hills silhouetted and the bomb, cradled with wires, looming overhead like a malevolent planet.
Finley, Rivera, Eric Owens and the rest of the cast are always as eloquent as the opera allows, and Lawrence Renes’s conducting is on the ball. Extras are disappointing: too much of Sellars holding forth, not enough on the production.
Andrew Clark, Financial Times, 23 August 2008
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/c28c80ce-70ad-11dd-b514-0000779fd18c.html?nclick_check=1
Doctor Atomic is the John Adams opera about Robert Oppenheimer, the US nuclear physicist who engineered the first atomic bomb and oversaw a test explosion in New Mexico in the dying days of the second world war. It is by no means Adams's best work: that, at least, was my verdict at the 2005 San Francisco premiere, an impression confirmed by this DVD of the same production in its Amsterdam incarnation. Unlike Adams's previous docu-operas, this one suffers from a poor libretto (Peter Sellars). Despite some arresting arias, the score fails to illuminate its subject and the ending is an anti-climax. Even so, I would recommend the DVD to anyone attending the work's Metropolitan Opera premiere in October or English National Opera's performances next February (neither, fortunately, in Sellars's staging), if only to familiarise yourself with Adams's overtly "political" approach to music-theatre and Gerald Finley's inspired performance in the title role.
Robert Hilferty, Bloomberg, 13 October 2008 [extracts]
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601088&sid=asoiHlT7P8Yo&refer=muse
A-Bomb's Tormented Scientist…
In ``Doctor Atomic'' by John Adams, a plutonium sphere hovers ominously above the stage, ushering in the nuclear age...
The ode to Oppenheimer is now out on a DVD, directed by Adams's longtime collaborator Peter Sellars, who presided over the world premiere in 2005 and cobbled together the problematic libretto.
He's not in charge of the Metropolitan Opera's new production opening tonight, which is directed by Penny Woolcock. Judging by the DVD (I also saw the premiere in San Francisco), that is probably a good thing. The designs by Adrienne Lobel are disappointingly skimpy and obviously not as well funded as the Manhattan Project.
…The story centers on J. Robert Oppenheimer's role in creating the atom bomb in 1945. Oppenheimer, nicknamed ``Oppie,'' is dynamically portrayed by baritone Gerald Finley as a brilliant physicist tormented by the prospect of his new weapon being dropped on innocent civilians in Japan following Germany's surrender in World War II.
His gentle side is displayed in a bedroom scene with his wife Kitty (Rivera). Later, under the sphere, Finley poignantly radiates the crushing weight of Oppie's dilemma on the eve of the first test blast. While singing John Donne's poem ``Batter My Heart,'' he contorts his body to Adams's jagged rhythms.
The second act begins with another stunning aria, this time by Kitty. But the opera is slowed by a lullaby sung by the American Indian maid (Ellen Rabiner) and continues to lose momentum until the finale. Lucinda Childs's choreography, which includes dancers who spin like subatomic particles, looks like leftovers from her work three decades ago in ``Einstein on the Beach.''
Bulging Waist
``No operatic evocation of the atom bomb could go head-to- head with the dazzling effects available to a Hollywood director,'' Adams writes in his recently released memoir, ``Hallelujah Junction'' (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Maybe. But a prerecorded female voice in Japanese asking where her husband is doesn't do the trick, either.
Sellars's libretto -- a patchwork of declassified documents, letters, reports and poetry -- derails into irrelevance and preciousness. Why the stretch about General Groves's expanding waistline? Sellars directs the DVD with interesting angles, but his camera is oddly unfocused as it lingers on Kitty asleep while the atomic test takes place. It's as if he's perversely suggesting this is her dream.
The best part of ``Doctor Atomic'' is Adams's multilayered score, a daring mix of modernism harking back to Edgard Varese, sci-fi pulp electronics and soaring lyricism.
George Hall, Opera, November 2008
Filmed during the first European production (June 2007) of John Adams's third big opera, this Amsterdam staging incorporates some minor changes made following the premiere in San Francisco (October 2005), but in visual essentials is a revisiting of the original. The singers of the roles of Kitty Oppenheimer and her Tewa Indian nurse Pasqualita are new, as is the conductor.
The major differences between Dr Atomic and its two large-scale predecessors in Adams's output are its librettist and indeed the nature of its libretto. Both Nixon and Klinglwifer benefited from the contribution of Alice Goodman, whose lucid, music-friendly texts managed to combine a poetic resonance of their own with an ability to give the score ample space to fulfil its own destiny. Unfortunately she withdrew from Dr Atomic, and Peter Sellars took over. His libretto consists almost entirely of either extracts from official documents, or poetic material selected from various sources- Baudelaire, John Donne, the Sanskrit Bhagavad Gita, Muriel Rukeyser, and songs of the Tewa Indians. Singing the poetry can make the opera's characters appear artificial, though Gerald Finley's Oppenheimer has the strongest interpolation, a setting of Donne's sonnet Trinity which forms a rare and successful 'operatic' moment at the end of the first act. Elsewhere, the documentary material proves stodgy and wordy to a degree. If Adams cannot find a way of setting lines like' It was agreed that psychological factors in selecting the targets are of great importance', or 'We'll kick-start the reaction with a modulated initiator', and making them musically interesting, one can hardly blame him. Too much of the piece consists of such stuff, in vocally dull settings, dully accompanied. The resulting characters however complex and urgent the real-life concerns of their originals may have been in the month leading up to the A-bomb test at Los Alamos in 1945-can barely summon up three dimensions between them. As actors, the main players are reduced to looking fraught for extended periods. It's understandable, given the material they have to work with, but dramatically it's nowhere near enough.
Sellars appears in an extended interview that is part of the generous bonus material. His half hour centre-stage shows not only how well versed he is in the history of the period covered in the opera but also how deeply he cares about the moral issues involved. His direction of the show itself can be criticized on two grounds. It's his own fault, as librettist, that he cannot, as director, make the characters live, but his recourse to his familiar in-time-to-the-music choral
(and sometimes individual) movements had become a tiresome cliche long before this particular production and remains one now, only more so. The staging is also compromised by Lucinda Childs's irritatingly vapid choreography, far too much of which consists of a group of dancers running and skipping in a circle behind the main action for no apparent reason, like an infant school's movement class. Adams's style has moved further away from his minimalist roots and the level of dissonance in his music has increased. There's a certain variety offered in the marital love scene between the Oppenheimers and in the New Age contributions of the Tewa housemaid, whom Sellars describes as an earthmother figure. Dramatically, too much of the piece operates on this simplistic, unambiguous level. As a musical performance, the Amsterdam production works well, with plenty of commitment on all sides. The problem lies deeper. Maybe Penny Woolcock's production for the Met and ENO will be able to kick some life into the piece.
Anne Midgette, Washington Post, 19 October 2008
Composer John Adams, Reaching Critical Mass
Opera can depict the end of the world: We've known that since Wagner's "Götterdämmerung." But the close of John Adams and Peter Sellars's "Doctor Atomic," rather than merely ending a world onstage, creates a space for the hypothetical destruction of the real one. This opera delineates a place of dread: The moments before the first A-bomb test in New Mexico in July 1945 become a metaphor for American anxiety during the decades of the Cold War as they waited for the big one to go off.
There is no moment of release. The music builds with inward-turning intensity, broken off by a long scream. And then, not with a bang but a whimper, the horrified chorus stares at something we cannot see while we hear the taped voice of a Japanese woman asking in her own language for a glass of water.
"Doctor Atomic" has just come out on a two-DVD set that documents the 2007 Amsterdam performances of Sellars's original 2005 production -- a release nearly coinciding with last week's opening of a new production of the work at the Metropolitan Opera. Indeed, the music world is in Adams fever this fall. The 61-year-old American composer's eclectic and cerebral memoir "Hallelujah Junction" has been released this month. To accompany it, Adams's longtime label Nonesuch has released a two-CD set of excerpts of his most important works, including "Harmonium," "Harmonielehre" and his violin concerto.
More satisfying than that CliffsNotes version is the new release of Adams's most recent opera/oratorio. "A Flowering Tree," has had several performances since its world premiere in Vienna in 2006, including the one with the London Symphony Orchestra and the original soloists from Vienna (Jessica Rivera, Russell Thomas and Eric Owens) documented on this original-cast recording.
It has been interesting to watch the development of Adams's appeal to the opera world since 1987, when "Nixon in China" brought him wide attention, and his works got the label of so-called "docu-opera." Certainly his large-scale vocal works have continued to take on topical political themes: terrorism and the Palestinian-Jewish question ("The Death of Klinghoffer"), the miracle of birth in a contemporary context that casts Christ as the child of Hispanic teen gang members ("El Niño").
The trajectory has not always been smooth; nor has it been determined by Adams alone. Sellars has been his operatic instigator and collaborator for 20 years, and the pieces are infused with this director/impresario's increasing earnestness as he moves from his early wackiness to his self-appointed role as an intense spokesman for society's conscience. In documentaries on the "Doctor Atomic" DVDs, the vignettes of Sellars talking about his mission offer a characteristic sense of art at its most stubbornly idealistic.
Adams's operatic music has followed a parallel path, moving from the bright, shiny ecstasy of "Nixon in China," expressed with a wide-eyed, pop-art kind of self-parody, to something richer. Adams's strength is his ability to tap into the familiarity of musical tradition while translating it into a contemporary idiom. This is music born of minimalism, with repeated rapid patterns and blocks of musical event in lieu of straightforward linear development. But if it bears traces of Philip Glass, it is no less influenced by Wagner, whose shadow hovers in the shimmering transformation music of "A Flowering Tree" (as the heroine actually becomes a tree laden with gorgeous blossoms) or in the pacing of the long, tortured monologues of "Doctor Atomic."
It is also music that often tries to do several things at once. Adams himself says on the DVD that "Doctor Atomic" draws on the vocabulary of the overwrought scores to 1950s sci-fi B movies, except with all the camp stripped away so you are left with pure anxiety conveyed by certain sound effects and timbres at key moments. But there are also moments of rich beauty. In the second scene, when the setting shifts from the lab to Robert and Kitty Oppenheimer's bedroom, the score is so purely gorgeous it could make you cry. (The cast is notable: Gerald Finley, with his strong baritone, owns the role of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb; Richard Paul Fink provides appropriate vocal darkness as the scientist Edward Teller; Owens is the husky, stentorian general; and Rivera is quite good in a role written for the luminous Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, who died before she was able to sing it.)
But is it opera? The question is not merely facetious. "A Flowering Tree," a homage to Mozart's "Magic Flute" and based on a Tamil legend, was conceived as an opera-oratorio, designed for concert as well as staged performance. And "Doctor Atomic," while it successfully evokes the sense of a long night of ordeal (the tedium of anxious waiting, the bouts of emotion, the drained calm in their wake), is not necessarily dramatic in an operatic sense. Sellars compiled the libretto from actual quotes, interspersed with poems by Rukeyser, Baudelaire, Donne and an excerpt from the Bhagavad Gita. The resulting textual juxtapositions are easier to appreciate when read than heard; and while having the characters express their inner thoughts in poetry is a beautiful conceit, it does not actually provide a sense of who they are or how they develop. (The DVD echoes the patchwork effect with rapid and distracting cuts from one image to another.)
Opera or not, both "Doctor Atomic" and "A Flowering Tree" grew on me with repeated hearings. "Doctor Atomic" is a self-consciously important work, slightly hobbled, I think, by the idea that it should be staged, with all of its heavy-handed symbolism (like the earth-mother figure of the Oppenheimers' Native American nanny). I would opt to listen to it in concert, in silence. "A Flowering Tree" is intended as musical balm. If it never seduces the ear as fully as some of Kitty's music in "Doctor Atomic," it is full of studied prettiness, like enamel. Owens is compelling as a narrator who, like a village storyteller, guides the listener through a story in which almost no one is completely good (except the heroine, Rivera). Yet there is a happy ending -- though the music, significantly, refuses to linger over it.
Bill Gowen, 7 January 2009, Daily Herald
Bill's top CDs of the year ... in random order
John Adams: "Doctor Atomic." Lawrence Renes conducting the Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra and chorus of the Netherlands Opera. Peter Sellars, stage director and librettist. Starring Gerald Finley, Jessica Rivera, Eric Owens and others. Opus Arte (two widescreen DVDs, including bonus features).
The rapid growth of classical music and opera DVDs continues, in this case the John Adams-Peter Sellars dramatization of the birth of the atomic age at Los Alamos, New Mexico, in 1945. A co-production of Lyric Opera of Chicago and San Francisco Opera and seen at the Lyric in the 2007-08 season, this DVD was recorded at Netherlands Opera in June 2007. It includes the Lyric production's Gerald Finley as J. Robert Oppenheimer and Jessica Rivera as Kitty Oppenheimer.
Miquel Cabruja, Klassik.com, 9 February 2009
Translated by Petra Habeth
Interpretation: 5 out of 5 stars
Sound quality: 5 out of 5 stars
Value of repertory: 5 out of 5 stars
Booklet: 4 out of 5 stars
Features: 5 out of 5 stars
Direction: 5 out of 5 stars
Remorseless countdown
John Adams is more than an important composer of the present day. Born in 1948, the American does not avoid controversies and, again and again in his works for the stage, deals with difficult questions like terrorism, migration and war. In what is his longest opera to date, Doctor Atomic, Adams puts his finger on the largest wound of more recent American history: the dropping of atomic bombs on two Japanese Metropolises at the end of the Second World War.
Apocalyptic destroyer of the worlds
„Doctor Atomic“ does not even try to describe the nuclear horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Instead the plot concentrates on the 24 hours which preceded the first atomic test of 16 July 1945 in the desert of New Mexico. Adams’ long time companion and director Peter Sellars composed a libretto, based on historical sources, in which J. Robert Oppenheimer stands at the center. Sellars shows the “father of the atomic bomb” and leader of the Manhattan project as a modern Faust who is riven by the striving polarities of his roles as apocalyptic destroyer of the world and devoted and caring family father.
Striking arias
Adam’s music grabs the listener like an adamant countdown. Tension and nervousness grow continuously up to the moment when time and the layers of music crash together in an infernal fireball of the bomb. The language of the orchestra is as gruff and fissured as light and shadow on an expressionist woodcut. The score unfolds in sacred-seeming choral passages and intimate scenes together in which recognizable motives and lyrical moments give firm support. The big soliloquizing arias of the protagonists belong to the most striking that contemporary opera has to offer.
Reality and fiction
2005 Dr Atomic had its world premiere at San Francisco with co-production at Amsterdam and Chicago. When the opera was recorded at the Nederlandse Opera, Peter Sellars was not only responsible for the stage direction but also for the video direction. As in his libretto Sellars interlocks reality and fiction. Choreographed and semii-oratorical passages lift the plot onto a surrealistic level which is a sharp contrast to the precisely reconstructed historical locations and presentation. Out of these different elements Sellars forms a depressing and intoxicating metaphorical language.
Ellen Rabiner, a natural phenomenon
And the singers? Gerald Finley makes clear how much Oppenheimer is torn between his fascination of power and the force of his conscience. He creates the central aria “batter my heart”, based on a poem by John Donne, as a shattering personality profile, in which for Adams an almost unbearable self-confidence and the fight between good and evil, light and dark is demonstrated. Jessica Rivera embodies Kitty Oppenheimer as a half-conscious messenger of disaster and archetypical woman and mother. As Red Indian servant Pasqualita the alto Ellen Rabiner is a natural phenomenon. The remaining ensemble of Thomas Glenn (Robert Wilson) and Richard Paul Fink (Edward Teller) is also convincing. Conductor Lawrence Renes focuses the centrifugal forces of the score and does not allow the tension to decrease for a second. This DVD should be valued as a reference recording.
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