Perhaps it’s all because of his iconic name but composer John Adams has a knack for making headline works, pieces that become the talk of a season. With a title like “Nixon in China,” his first opera was guaranteed to garner attention back in 1987. It didn’t hurt that the work itself was colorful, humorous and insightful.
Adams has continued in the so-called CNN-school of American opera with “The Death of Klinghoffer” (1991) and most recently with “Doctor Atomic,” about Robert Oppenheimer and the making of the first atomic bomb.
The two-act, three-hour-long piece premiered at the San Francisco Opera in 2005 and a new production runs through Nov. 14 at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. It will be simulcast to movie theaters on Saturday, Nov. 8, and a delayed radio broadcast is scheduled for Saturday afternoon, Jan. 17.
Over the years, I’ve enjoyed many Adams works, large and small, and “Nixon” was once such a favorite that I can still sing some of its arias. So what a let down that “Doctor Atomic” was such a deadly evening in the theater.
There weren’t obvious shortcomings in the staging by Penny Wolcock, a film director working for the first time in opera, or in the conducting by Alan Gilbert, the young music director designate of the New York Philharmonic. The Met’s grand stagecraft was all there and the orchestra sounded as tight and on target as ever.
The problem is really with the piece itself.
The libretto, Sellars’ cobbling together of pre-existing texts, is a drama-free zone. The opening 20 minutes felt lifted from a textbook on nuclear physics. During the second scene, set in the bedroom of Oppenheimer and his wife, one wondered if the characters were actually speaking to each other, their language being so arcane and obscure.
Much of the rest of the action takes places on the New Mexico testing site with the orblike bomb hanging above the performers’ heads. Film projections cast sheets of gray rain onto the set as supernumeraries, inexplicably done up like American Indians, appeared amid the serious-minded men dressed in trench coats and fedoras. They are all nearly faceless and completely unsympathetic.
The only musical number that stands out was at the end of Act 1, when Oppenheimer, played by bass-baritone Gerald Finley, walks to the edge of the stage and sings a sonnet by John Donne, “Batter my heart, three-person’d God.” It seems to be a moment of tortured self-reflection, yet it arrives out of nowhere. Was Oppenheimer previously conflicted? It was impossible to tell.
Ever resourceful with his musical material, Adams has fashioned a “Doctor Atomic” Symphony that I’ll bet takes the obvious power of the orchestral writing and compacts it into something more taut and cogent. And Peter Sellars’ original staging, forthcoming on a DVD from Opus Arte, may also cast the piece in a better light.
I’ve greatly admired the Met’s lavish treatment of new works in recent seasons and was happy that an Adams piece finally made it to the big house, but can still hardly believe how off-putting was “Doctor Atomic.”
Yet the weekend in Manhattan was not a totally lost cause. The previous night, a rare revival of Leonard Bernstein’s “Mass” at Carnegie Hall had all the emotional life and communicative power missing from the Met. Conductor Marin Alsop led the mammoth forces, including her Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, the Morgan State University Choir and the Brooklyn Youth Chorus, and a “street chorus” of 20 uniformly talented young soloists.
Baritone Jubilant Sykes gave a daring and heartfelt portrayal of the celebrant, a kind of liturgical master of ceremonies who ends up becoming the scapegoat for the people’s frustrations with God, church and society.
Written for the 1971 opening of the Kennedy Center in Washington, “Mass” depicts a troubled, war-torn world through the lens of the ancient Catholic ritual and encompasses a mind-boggling mix of popular and classical styles.
I wondered how all the performers could be squeezed onto the Carnegie stage, yet this turned out to be more than a concert performance, in fact, a lively staging. The orchestra was split down the middle like the Red Sea, with Alsop on a podium to one side, and a central playing area created in the middle where the celebrant and chorus members took their turns with the “tropes” that comment on and rebut the Latin texts.
Perhaps it was because the soloists were amplified and much of their accompaniment came from the electric guitar and bass and drum set, but the only portions of the score that seemed faded or weak were the purely orchestral interludes. Otherwise, Bernstein’s propulsive tunes and Steven Schwartz’s clever and insightful lyrics spoke vividly to our own times.
At the Met the following evening, I recalled the celebrant’s line, “Oh you big men of merit who ferret out flaws, you rely on our compliance with your science and your laws.” And I saw them up on the stage, Oppenheimer and other “big men.” It is as if “Doctor Atomic” depicts the kind of backroom mucking with the forces of nature that “Mass” protests. There’s plenty of anger in “Mass,” but Bernstein made it feel like a hell of a lot more fun to be outside the gates of power, railing and celebrating. Alsop’s account of “Mass,” by the way, is being recorded for release on Naxos.
[...] Disappointed that the Naxos recording of Bernstein’s Mass with Jubilant Sykes as the celebrant and Marin Alsop conducting the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra didn’t win a Grammy last Sunday. I heard the performance at Carnegie Hall in October 2008 and loved it. But it was a weird weekend in Manhattan, with the joy of Mass one night followed by the deadly experience of Adam’s Doctor Atomic the next (full review). [...]