Put someone it admires there, it becomes a truly international standard band. The BBC Symphony Orchestra is a bit of a chameleon orchestra, by which I mean, put a conductor it does not respect at the helm, and mediocrity flows. The stage was bathed in a variety of colours as the situation implied. The semi-staged production was extremely simple – a desk with an old-fashioned analogue telephone on one side (from which desk Ross gave his lecture) and a seat on the other. Referring to Doctor Atomic as “a portrait of the divided American soul,” one emerged with a sense of a work that speaks from Adams’ heart. A pre-concert presentation by Alex Ross (“The sounds that changed America”) gave a fascinating overview of Adams’ output with many political references. Robert Oppenheimer’s research at Los Alamos which also includes external poetry, referring to Oppenheimer’s alleged love for that form (act one ends with an astonishing setting of John Donne’s Holy Sonnet “Batter My Heart, Three-person’d God”), as well as passages from the Bhagavad Gita. Peter Sellars’ libretto is a collection of texts around the atomic test as a result of Dr J. ![]() While I was present at ENO’s Doctor Atomic in its UK premiere in 2009, this performance seemed more assured and yet at the same time more raw, more powerful. Thomas Adès’ The Exterminating Angel proved a fruitful and powerful affair ( review here) much the same could be said of John Adams’ Doctor Atomic, although the power was achieved by very different means. ![]() We as Londoners are truly blessed to be in a position to experience two major contemporary operas performed on consecutive nights both with major casts and both conducted by the composers. (CC) Brindley Sherratt, Aubrey Allicock and Gerald Finley in Doctor Atomic (c) Mark Allan/BBC United Kingdom Adams, Doctor Atomic (semi-staged): Soloists, BBC Singers and BBC Symphony Orchestra / John Adams (conductor), Barbican Hall, London.
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