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This is the premiere recording of both works. Also on the album is Adams’ 2001 piece, Guide to Strange Places. A purely instrumental work, the piece is drawn from Adams’s opera Doctor Atomic. Nonesuch released Pulitzer Prize–winning composer John Adams’s Doctor Atomic Symphony on July 28, 2009. Recorded live, there’s an emphatic urgency to the playing, wholly in keeping with music that seems fervently alive to both felt and imagined experience."An adaptation of several extended sections ," 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." Mysterious and intense, it prowls and probes the landscapes of ‘paysages insolites’ (strange places) with a mysterious, metaphorical intensity that tellingly calls to mind Charles Ives’ Central Park in the Dark.Īs with the symphony, David Robertson – the work’s dedicatee – and his St Louis Symphony forces take a robustly muscular and rooted approach to Adams’ multi-layered, intricately woven latticework of sounds and colours leavened by flights of poetic fancy and fantasy. Prompted by a book about Provence in southern France, the single-movement, 23-minute-long travelogue Guide to Strange Places proves a surprisingly apt coupling. The concluding Trinity searches for point and purpose within Oppenheimer’s morally-ambivalent ambition by setting the heart-stopping aria Batter My Heart (heard in the opera’s first Act, it takes its lyrics from a poem by John Donne) for Susan Slaughter’s evocative solo trumpet.

Incandescent brass figures sound warning fanfares as swirling strings are swept up into a maelstrom of heat and noise that seems to ominously anticipate greater nightmares still to come. In Panic, the middle movement, percussion thumps ominously beneath orchestral forces dramatically battling with the rapidly rising emotional temperature. Reworked into a three-movement symphony, the dark profundity of the subject is foregrounded in characteristically complex, tightly woven musical ideas.ĭepicting Oppenheimer’s Los Alamos, New Mexico laboratory, the opening movement seethes with a turbulent energy, pent-up brass threatening to boil over into explosive scalding cascades of mayhem and noise, strings straining against impossible pressures to maintain the outline of shape and form. Few contemporary works deal with so crucial a crisis of conscience as John Adams’ Doctor Atomic, his opera about the creator of the atom bomb, Robert J Oppenheimer.įirst seen in 2005 (and staged in the UK for this first time earlier this year by English National Opera), it hinges on Oppenheimer’s conflicted relationship with the project – enthralled by the pure science of splitting an atom but appalled by its lethal application.