John Adams: Doctor Atomic to travel internationally(July 2005) Doctor Atomic, the much-awaited new opera by John Adams and Peter Sellars, is unveiled at the San Francisco Opera on 1 October. Donald Runnicles conducts the premiere staging by Peter Sellars with a cast including Gerald Finley and Kristine Jepson as scientist Robert Oppenheimer and his wife Kitty, Friedemann Röhlig, Tom Randle and James Maddalena.
The European premiere of the Sellars production will be presented by Netherlands Opera at the Holland Festival in Amsterdam (June 2007), with further performances planned by English National Opera in London and Chicago Lyric Opera. This latest collaboration of Adams and Sellars follows the operas Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer, and hybrid stageworks including El Niño and I was looking at the ceiling and then I saw the sky. Adopting a working method similar to that for El Niño, Adams and Sellars have assembled the libretto for Doctor Atomic from a range of primary sources, including Edward Teller's memoirs, newspaper interviews and declassified government documents, alongside the poetry of Muriel Rukeyser and Charles Baudelaire. Synopsis July 1945. The war is in its final, terrible phase. Germany has surrendered but Japan will fight to the bitter end, costing possibly a half million casualties. In the New Mexico desert a group of young physicists, hand-picked and led by the brilliant, complex J. Robert Oppenheimer, have laboured furiously in a race against Hitler to develop the world's first atomic bomb. Now, in the hours before the first test explosion, they are confronted with the moral crisis of its inevitable use on Japanese citizens. Against a backdrop of desert solitude and scorched landscapes, the stage becomes both a laboratory of apocalyptic science and ground zero for a new millennium in human history. No one knows whether the bomb will work, and if it does, whether it might ignite the entire earth's atmosphere. In the unbearable tension of the final hours, only the women, forbidden from the test area, seem to realise the magnitude of its consequences. Adams Doctor Atomic (2004-05) Commissioned by San Francisco Opera in a co-production with the Lyric Opera of Chicago and the Netherlands Opera 1 October 2005 (world premiere) 5/7/9(mat)/11/14/16(mat)/18/20/22 October San Francisco Opera Conductor: Donald Runnicles Director: Peter Sellars Visit www.doctor-atomic.com > Further information on Work: Doctor Atomic Set Model for Doctor Atomic: San Francisco Opera > News Search |
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