After giving John Adams's Doctor Atomic its UK premiere last Wednesday, English National Opera continues performances of the opera this week. "If a work forces you, simultaneously and uncomfortably, to clench your limbs and hold your breath," says The Observer, "you have to take notice." A highlight of "Adams's meditative, richly faceted score," the paper exclaims, is the aria set to John Donne's "Batter My Heart," for J. Robert Oppenheimer, "surely the finest aria written since Puccini."
After giving John Adams's Doctor Atomic its UK premiere last Wednesday, English National Opera continues performances of the 2005 opera this week. The Metropolitan Opera had broadcast its production, which premiered in New York last fall, to British movie theaters, but, says The Observer's Fiona Maddocks, given "Adams's meditative, richly faceted score ... nothing prepared you for the impact in the theatre. If a work forces you, simultaneously and uncomfortably, to clench your limbs and hold your breath, you have to take notice."
Maddocks boldly asserts that the opera's most oft-discussed aria, Adams's setting of John Donne's "Batter My Heart" for J. Robert Oppenheimer, "is surely the finest aria written since Puccini."
She concludes:
Adams, whose Nixon in China became a late 20th-century operatic icon, has produced another landmark work, less obvious, more faulty, but finally more terrifying and provocative. In the closing minutes electronic noise roars and thunders round the theatre. If the earth didn't move for you, it did for me.
Read the full review at guardian.co.uk.
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