![]() Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,īut is captived, and proves weak or untrue. Your force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new. That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend Atomic (about Robert Oppenheimer and the setting off of the first atomic bomb):īatter my heart, three-person’d God for youĪs yet but knock breathe, shine, and seek to mend John Donne’s plea in Holy Sonnet XIV that grace will break his captive will, set to necessarily inadequate but characteristically gorgeous music by John Adams and sung by bass-baritone Gerald Finley in the Adams opera Dr. Conductor Lawrence Renes delivers a polished performance of what is one of Adams's finest scores to date.Mockingbird’s resident opera aficionado Ken Wilson offers forth a truly breathtaking moment of beauty: But at least Adams knows it he trimmed her part down since the opera was performed in Chicago two years ago. And there's still too much of Pasqualita, Kitty's hefty American Indian serving girl, and her Mystic Meg visions. The love story between Oppenheimer and his wife Kitty (Sasha Cooke in fine voice) is less successful, harbouring some crazily awful lines - "my eyes splitting the skull to tickle your brain with love". Underneath them, director Penny Woolcock allows the intense mundanity of daily life to play itself out simply, realistically, as the leading pack of scientists and army personnel slowly buckle under the strain of it all.Ĭharacters are finely etched: Brindley Sherratt's sarcastic physicist Edward Teller, Thomas Glenn's whinny physicist Robert Wilson, Jonathan Veira's self-obsessed General Groves. Julian Crouch's sets impressively stack the declamatory chorus of scientists like they were saints in a medieval fresco. It works in the manner of an oratorio or cantata, weaving philosophical ideas, intellectual arguments and psychological outbursts around a simple framework, the build-up of tension at the Los Alamos scientific compound as it prepares for the first atomic tests. It's really more of an explosion of anguish, rage and self-loathing, spat out with desperation, Gerald Finley superbly transforming this self-contained, supremely confident man of science into a wreck.ĭoctor Atomic is a class act. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |