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John Adams: Doctor Atomic (DVD)
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.
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.
Photo gallery
