I steeped myself in some imported culture this week — modern classical music by two of the most famous living American composers. Thursday evening I went over to the Barbican to hear the London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by John Adams, performing his own new City Noir, written about Los Angeles in honor of Gustavo Dudamel’s taking over the LA Philharmonic last year. The evening started with what seemed to me perhaps slightly halfhearted performances of Debussy and Ravel, but things picked up fantastically after the break. Jeremy Denk took on the piano (which rises majestically from a hole in the...
Posted by Andrew on March 14, 2010 1:15 PM
I went to see and hear John Adams’ recent opera Doctor Atomic at the ENO last night. One of my physicist-companions was my friend, fellow blogger and cosmologist Peter Coles, and he has already applied his greater musical knowledge to the task, so I won’t attempt an overall review. In short, Doctor Atomic is the story of Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who managed the Manhattan Project and, therefore, the creation of the American atomic bomb. The opera concentrates on the day or so before the first atomic test. But we can’t help knowing, indeed are supposed to know, what comes...
Posted by Andrew on March 1, 2009 8:02 PM
The nightmare of all art, as well as of all politics, is generalities. You cannot generalize. You’ve got to keep things as specific to the minute, as down to the wire, as possible. --Peter Sellars in Alex Ross’s “Countdown” (from The New Yorker), on Dr. Atomic, the new opera about physicist Robert Oppenheimer and the birth of the atomic bomb, from director and librettist Sellars and composer John Adams. The article isn’t available online, but Ross writes more about the opera here, here and here, and posts some pictures here (and if you tire of Ross’s take on the...
Posted by Andrew on October 30, 2005 4:11 PM
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