Doctor Atomic Symphony

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DescriptionExcerpt

Adams based this all-instrumental work on his opera Doctor Atomic. The New York Times wrote: "[T]he score invites you to hear the music—driving passages with pounding timpani, quizzically restrained lyrical flights, bursts of skittish fanfares—on its own terms, apart from its dramatic context." This first recording, by David Robertson and the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra, includes 2001's Guide to Strange Places, which the Guardian calls "one of Adams's most impressive achievements of the last decade." The Times of London has named this album the Classical Album of the Decade.

Description

"An adaptation of several extended sections [of the Doctor Atomic opera]," wrote the New York Times, "the score invites you to hear the music—driving passages with pounding timpani, quizzically restrained lyrical flights, bursts of skittish fanfares—on its own terms, apart from its dramatic context."

Nonesuch released Pulitzer Prize–winning composer John Adams’s Doctor Atomic Symphony on July 28, 2009. A purely instrumental work, the piece is drawn from Adams’s opera Doctor Atomic. Also on the album is Adams’ 2001 piece, Guide to Strange Places. This is the premiere recording of both works. David Robertson conducts the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra on this recording, which is his first CD with the ensemble.

Doctor Atomic Symphony’s three movements include music from the opera’s overture; the Act II “panic” music; the “military matters” sections from Act I; and an orchestral setting of Robert Oppenheimer’s signature “Batter My Heart” aria that closes Act I of the opera. Creating a symphony from a three-hour opera proved to be no small task, as Adams told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch: “It was like being a filmmaker, with cans and cans of footage I’d shot, and I had to edit it in a meaningful way.”

Doctor Atomic is the fifth work for the stage that Adams and his longtime collaborator Peter Sellars created. The opera concerns the final hours leading up to the first atomic bomb explosion at the Alamagordo test site in New Mexico in July of 1945. The focal characters are the physicist and Manhattan Project director, Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer; his wife Kitty; Edward Teller; and General Leslie Groves, the US Army commander of the project. It has been critically praised by, among others, The New Yorker, which called its score “not only ominous score also uncommonly beautiful. Scene after scene glows with strange energy,” and the New York Times, which called the score, “Mr. Adams’s most complex and masterly music.”

Guide to Strange Places was inspired by a book Adams found in Provence: Guide noir de la Provence mystérieuse (A Black Guide to Mysterious Provence). He says, “It was one of those typically French guides—minutely detailed and bristling with information and odd facts about the area. In this location there was a strange geological formation; in another, unusual climatic occurrences; somewhere else a horrific historical event had taken place or perhaps a miracle had been witnessed. A chapter was dedicated to paysages insolites—or ‘strange places.’ Each classification came with its own special identifying icon. It set my imagination off.” Adams continues, “In a sense, all of my pieces are travel pieces, often through paysages insolites—it’s the way I experience musical form.”

The Los Angeles Times said of the work, which was completed in early September 2001, “What begins as bright, chirping birdsong ends with frightening bass drum thuds and unresolved growls in the brass ... [I]t sounded as if Adams had presciently found the strange places we all discover after our complacency is shattered.” The Guardian calls it "one of Adams's most impressive achievements of the last decade."

ProductionCredits

PRODUCTION CREDITS
Produced by Steven Epstein
Recording Engineer: Richard King
Assistant Engineers (St. Louis): Paul Hennerich and Lee Buckalew
Assistant Engineer (SevenSeas Studios): Drea Young
Mixed at SevenSeas Studios, NYC

This recording was made possible by a generous gift from the Centene Charitable Foundation, St. Louis, MO.

Photography by Deborah O’Grady
Design by John Heiden for SMOG Design

Executive Producer: Robert Hurwitz

Nonesuch Selection Number

468220

Number of Discs in Set
1disc
Album Status
Artist Name
John Adams
MusicianDetails

MUSICIANS
Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra
David Robertson, Music Director

Cover Art
UPC/Price
Label
CD+MP3
UPC
075597993288BUN
Label
MP3
Price
9.00
UPC
075597993271
  • 468220

News & Reviews

  • Girls of the Golden West, John Adams’ eighth music theater work to be released by Nonesuch, is due April 26. The composer leads the LA Phil in this recording made in Disney Hall, with the Los Angeles Master Chorale led by Grant Gershon. You can hear the aria "Wagon Ride," featuring Davóne Tines and Julia Bullock, now. For the opera, which tells the story of the California Gold Rush, longtime Adams collaborator Peter Sellars drew from original sources from the era—letters, journals, newspaper articles, and familiar song lyrics—to create the libretto. The cast also includes Paul Appleby, Hye Jung Lee, Elliot Madore, Daniela Mack, and Ryan McKinny.

  • The Metropolitan Opera has announced its 2024–25 season, including the Met premiere of John Adams's latest opera, Antony and Cleopatra, on May 12, 2025. The adaptation of Shakespeare’s drama stars soprano Julia Bullock, following her company debut in Adams’s El Niño this April, as Cleopatra, opposite bass-baritone Gerald Finley’s Antony. Adams himself conducts a new staging by director Elkhanah Pulitzer, who transports the story from ancient Rome to the Golden Age of Hollywood in the 1930s. Performances run through June 7, 2025. 

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  • About This Album

    "An adaptation of several extended sections [of the Doctor Atomic opera]," wrote the New York Times, "the score invites you to hear the music—driving passages with pounding timpani, quizzically restrained lyrical flights, bursts of skittish fanfares—on its own terms, apart from its dramatic context."

    Nonesuch released Pulitzer Prize–winning composer John Adams’s Doctor Atomic Symphony on July 28, 2009. A purely instrumental work, the piece is drawn from Adams’s opera Doctor Atomic. Also on the album is Adams’ 2001 piece, Guide to Strange Places. This is the premiere recording of both works. David Robertson conducts the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra on this recording, which is his first CD with the ensemble.

    Doctor Atomic Symphony’s three movements include music from the opera’s overture; the Act II “panic” music; the “military matters” sections from Act I; and an orchestral setting of Robert Oppenheimer’s signature “Batter My Heart” aria that closes Act I of the opera. Creating a symphony from a three-hour opera proved to be no small task, as Adams told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch: “It was like being a filmmaker, with cans and cans of footage I’d shot, and I had to edit it in a meaningful way.”

    Doctor Atomic is the fifth work for the stage that Adams and his longtime collaborator Peter Sellars created. The opera concerns the final hours leading up to the first atomic bomb explosion at the Alamagordo test site in New Mexico in July of 1945. The focal characters are the physicist and Manhattan Project director, Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer; his wife Kitty; Edward Teller; and General Leslie Groves, the US Army commander of the project. It has been critically praised by, among others, The New Yorker, which called its score “not only ominous score also uncommonly beautiful. Scene after scene glows with strange energy,” and the New York Times, which called the score, “Mr. Adams’s most complex and masterly music.”

    Guide to Strange Places was inspired by a book Adams found in Provence: Guide noir de la Provence mystérieuse (A Black Guide to Mysterious Provence). He says, “It was one of those typically French guides—minutely detailed and bristling with information and odd facts about the area. In this location there was a strange geological formation; in another, unusual climatic occurrences; somewhere else a horrific historical event had taken place or perhaps a miracle had been witnessed. A chapter was dedicated to paysages insolites—or ‘strange places.’ Each classification came with its own special identifying icon. It set my imagination off.” Adams continues, “In a sense, all of my pieces are travel pieces, often through paysages insolites—it’s the way I experience musical form.”

    The Los Angeles Times said of the work, which was completed in early September 2001, “What begins as bright, chirping birdsong ends with frightening bass drum thuds and unresolved growls in the brass ... [I]t sounded as if Adams had presciently found the strange places we all discover after our complacency is shattered.” The Guardian calls it "one of Adams's most impressive achievements of the last decade."

    Credits

    MUSICIANS
    Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra
    David Robertson, Music Director

    PRODUCTION CREDITS
    Produced by Steven Epstein
    Recording Engineer: Richard King
    Assistant Engineers (St. Louis): Paul Hennerich and Lee Buckalew
    Assistant Engineer (SevenSeas Studios): Drea Young
    Mixed at SevenSeas Studios, NYC

    This recording was made possible by a generous gift from the Centene Charitable Foundation, St. Louis, MO.

    Photography by Deborah O’Grady
    Design by John Heiden for SMOG Design

    Executive Producer: Robert Hurwitz

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