Adams: Doctor Atomic Symphony reviews at BBC Proms
(September 2007)
John Adams conducted the premiere of his Doctor Atomic Symphony at the BBC Proms on 21 August, continuing in his role as the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s Artist-in-Association.
The new 42-minute orchestral work brings to the concert hall music from his opera Doctor Atomic, telling the story of J Robert Oppenheimer, who was the lead scientist in the development of the atom bomb, tested in the New Mexico desert in summer 1945. As the Evening Standard wrote, the “vivid account whetted one’s appetite for the opera proper but also proved effective as a stand-alone piece.”
Highlights from the opera have been arranged by Adams into the four movement symphony, with newly composed transitions and orchestrations of the vocal lines. It was co-commissioned by the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra, Carnegie Hall and BBC Radio 3 for the BBC Proms. The symphony’s dedicatee David Robertson conducts its US premiere with the Saint Louis Symphony on 7 February 2008 and the orchestra visits Carnegie Hall on 16 February to give the New York premiere.
“The opening movement, Laboratory, launches explosively with surging brass, motoric strings and thunderous percussion. Urgent, throbbing, industrial music ebbs and flows before moving, without a break, to the second section, Bedroom. The poetry-loving scientist J Robert Oppenheimer, the central character, is in bed with his wife. A gorgeous wash of sensuous music, with a tender cello theme, depicts Oppenheimer - finally dragged away from his statistics and data - reading erotic Baudelaire to her as an expression of love.
“Back in the lab, panic is rising in the third movement, as the team of scientists prepare for the test explosion. Haunting chromatic brass lurches into robotic chaos. Only in the final movement, Trinity, can we imagine how the vocal writing might sound. Oppenheimer’s last, soul-searching aria sets an anguished devotional poem by John Donne (Batter my heart). An eloquent trumpet solo, at once noble and elegiac, leaves its plaintive melodic mark in this most expressive finale.”
Evening Standard
“…powerfully eloquent… It’s a big statement on a big subject.”
Independent on Sunday
“The humanity of both pieces – symphony and opera – is to be found in the music reflecting the private world of Oppenheimer and his wife Kitty, a world essentially torn apart by the terrible implications of his discovery. But Adams looks at the bigger picture in the slow movement of his symphony… through transfixing solos for horn, trombone and cellos he has us stargazing in wonder at worlds beyond the one we inhabit – the implication being “where next?” Then, in a furious finale evolving from a vortex of string figurations, he arrives at his moment of truth – that trumpet solo. Heavy with anxiety, it is an aria of regret for the American Dream betrayed; the loneliest sound in the world for the loneliest man in the world.”
The Independent
This autumn brings the world premiere of Adams’s Son of Chamber Symphony, a successor to the Chamber Symphony of 1992, one of his most popular pieces with close on 300 performances to date. Son of Chamber Symphony is commissioned by Stanford Lively Arts and Carnegie Hall for Alarm Will Sound and San Francisco Ballet for Mark Morris. The premiere takes place in Stanford on 30 November with a Carnegie Hall date set on 28 February 2008. Ballet performances choreographed by Mark Morris are scheduled during San Francisco Ballet’s 2008 season.
> Further information on Work: Doctor Atomic Symphony
Photo: Deborah O'Grady
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