The Opera Tattler

John Adams' Doctor Atomic had its world premiere on the first day of this month at San Francisco Opera. The opera is in English and is set in New Mexico in July 1945. It starts off with the chorus singing something like "Energy! Matter can neither be created nor destroyed!" It was difficult not to laugh, and I admit, I did laugh many times rather inappropriately to the situations being depicted. The audience was more or less indifferent to these scenes, which I found impossibly absurd.

Adrianne Lobel's set was appropriately stark, many aspects of it moved vertically and hung from the unseen ceiling. The floor had geometric shapes carved into it, a circle off to the right side midstage, upstage some lines met. Certain elements of the set design and staging were rather cliché. The shadow of Oppenheimer behind the sheet covering the bomb was especially egregious, as was a crib strategically placed beneath the bomb itself.

Lucinda Childs' choreography was somewhere between Graham and dance seen in musicals. Too bad SF ballet has no sense of synchronization, it could have been very good. The loudness of the music did cover up most of their eternal clumping, however. One of the dancers did execute a gorgeous hinge to the ground as Pasqualita (Beth Clayton) sang about cloud blossoms.

The singers were quite solidly good. Often with contemporary music, I can't really tell one way or another. I liked the aria "Batter My Heart, Three-Personed God" at the end of the first act, it almost sounded Baroque. The words are from John Donne's Holy Sonnet XIV, and thus are not completely inane. It actually has a tune a normal person can follow and perchance even remember. Adams, at times, sounds very much like Glass to me, a lot of agitated clanging and building up without release.

In the end, the release is simply silence. This dead silence is extremely unusual at the opera and only happened because the audience was could not tell if there was to be more singing.

John Adams' Doctor Atomic had its world premiere on the first day of this month at San Francisco Opera. The opera is in English and is set in New Mexico in July 1945. It starts off with the chorus singing something like "Energy! Matter can neither be created nor destroyed!" It was difficult not to laugh, and I admit, I did laugh many times rather inappropriately to the situations being depicted. The audience was more or less indifferent to these scenes, which I found impossibly absurd.

Adrianne Lobel's set was appropriately stark, many aspects of it moved vertically and hung from the unseen ceiling. The floor had geometric shapes carved into it, a circle off to the right side midstage, upstage some lines met. Certain elements of the set design and staging were rather cliché. The shadow of Oppenheimer behind the sheet covering the bomb was especially egregious, as was a crib strategically placed beneath the bomb itself.

Lucinda Childs' choreography was somewhere between Graham and dance seen in musicals. Too bad SF ballet has no sense of synchronization, it could have been very good. The loudness of the music did cover up most of their eternal clumping, however. One of the dancers did execute a gorgeous hinge to the ground as Pasqualita (Beth Clayton) sang about cloud blossoms.

The singers were quite solidly good. Often with contemporary music, I can't really tell one way or another. I liked the aria "Batter My Heart, Three-Personed God" at the end of the first act, it almost sounded Baroque. The words are from John Donne's Holy Sonnet XIV, and thus are not completely inane. It actually has a tune a normal person can follow and perchance even remember. Adams, at times, sounds very much like Glass to me, a lot of agitated clanging and building up without release.

In the end, the release is simply silence. This dead silence is extremely unusual at the opera and only happened because the audience was could not tell if there was to be more singing.

But as I look back on other recently composed operas that have happened at SF, Doctor Atomic is probably the least awful. Saint Francis just sounded like cell phones because of the ondes martenot, Le Grande Macrabre was painfully absurd, and Doktor Faust was simply nothing much.