The eyes of the musical world turned to the San Francisco Opera for the international premiere of Doctor Atomic by John Adams, with Canadian Gerald Finley in the title role. The composer's frequent collaborator, Peter Sellars, assembled the libretto from personal and historical accounts of J. Robert Oppenheimer and the team that exploded the first nuclear bomb at Los Alamos in the summer of 1945.
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In Adrianne Lobel's setting, the huge bomb hovers before the colors of the New Mexico mountains as the countdown to zero hour builds tension through the evening. Dunya Ramicova's clothes caught the period moment, although Lucinda Childs' persistently flitting, ever-repetitious dancers distracted from several great scenes. She and Sellars need to put faith in the stillness at the heart of this reflective work.
Adams's music covers practical, philosophical and political debates about the uncertainties around the project. But questions about personal responsibility and morality lie at the centre of his concern. These haunt not only Oppenheimer (Gerald Finley) and his wife, Kitty (Kristine Jepson), but the idealistic young physicist, Robert Wilson (Thomas Glenn, another Canadian, who was taking his first central role on SFO's main stage). The music for this meditative side is structured around poetry from Donne, Baudelaire, Muriel Rukeyser and the Bhagavad Gita. Adams builds a potently eclectic score that lacks the circling, synthesized ground that marked his earlier minimalism. The opera begins with recorded sounds of plane engines and radio and ends at the explosion, with assembled rumblings, Japanese voices and eerie silence. The music evokes Wagnerian doom along with serial composition of the mid-20th century, Stravinsky and Broadway music of the time. Singers are given mostly recitatives evocative of Debussy and, at the big moments, arioso lines soaring with poetic language.
Oppenheimer closes Act I with an aria set on Donne's "Holy Sonnet XIV": "Batter my heart, three-person'd God." Here and everywhere, Finley brought intensity, lucid diction, lovely warmth of tone and profound expressiveness to the conflicted, philosophical and highly literary scientist. This aria already is the most famous in Dr. Atomic, though the bedroom scene, built around words by Baudelaire and, for Kitty's aria, Rukeyser's "Easter Eve, 1945," are more subtle in their emotionality. Jepson shone at this crucial moment in an opera in which history dictates a cast of men. As for Glenn, the youthful vigor of his high tenor and his lithe movement compellingly caught the touching conviction of an informed doubter. He shared Findley's triumph at the final curtain.
Donald Runnicles commanded the large, conventional orchestra (which carried most of the score's weight) and a range of microphones, amplifiers, synthesizers and recorded sound forms. Much of the credit for the potent expressive effect of this compelling new opera must go to him, and to the superb chorus directed by Ian Robertson.