With this week's Met premiere of John Adams's 2005 opera Doctor Atomic, the Boston Globe's Jeremy Eichler explores the composer's success at using "this centuries-old art form" to give contemporary history's "over-chronicled episodes a new multidimensionality and resonance."

Eichler calls it "a curious brand of alchemy Adams has mastered," to accomplish this,

one that transmutes the dry, hard factness of the past into something more vital and vibrating, something that hints at the psychological states of history's protagonists, that taps underground reservoirs of emotion, and that plumbs the mythic dimension of moments that—even as they unfold—seem to stand outside the normal flow of time.

Such is certainly the case with Adams's recent opera Doctor Atomic, a hauntingly powerful, deeply humane and eloquent work that opened in an effective new staging at the Metropolitan Opera on Monday evening.

The reviewer praises Adams's score as "some of his most compelling and imaginative music to date," one that "weds a cool Stravinskian precision and rhythmic vitality with a kind of seething Wagnerian dread." He also lauds the libretto, which was collected by Peter Sellars from historical sources, "a remarkable document" and an "unusual brew of sources" the provides both authenticity and distance from an overly literal telling.

With Sellars original production from 2005 in San Francisco and the newly created version for the Met by director Penny Woolcock, says Eichler, "This fortunate modern opera now has two viable stagings in circulation."

He also has kind words for the principal performers, all "universally strong," and credits conductor Alan Gilbert with drawing "wonders from the Met Orchestra. This was an exceptionally clear reading but also one with an intuitive feel for the music's broader emotional arc."

Ultimately, Eichler says, Doctor Atomic "bears sensitive witness to the crossing of a threshold in world history." He concludes:

And it's all within the music. Friedrich Schlegel once described the historian as a "prophet facing backwards." John Adams is a composer with a rare gift for creating works that look in both directions at once."

Read the full review at boston.com.
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The opera and its premiere are the focus of today's episode of WNYC's Soundcheck, titled "An Explosive Opera Arrives in New York." The show's host, John Schaefer, talks with the composer and cast-member Eric Owens, both of whom made their Met debuts this week. You can listen to the archived episode online at wnyc.org.

In the Soundcheck blog, Schaefer comments on the recent New York Times article by Anthony Tommasini on contemporary composers' changing perceptions of opera, citing Philip Glass's game-changing 1976 collaboration with Robert Wilson, Einstein on the Beach.

"Even an opera like John Adams’s Doctor Atomic," he writes, "which has an almost Romantic sound, with flowing solos and dramatic choruses, is very different, in subtle but important ways, from the world of Puccini, Verdi, and Rossini." Schaefer goes on to examine why modern composers have avoided of the sort of hummable tunes earlier composers might have used and the impact this has had on the form. You can read his thoughts and add your own at blogs.wnyc.org.

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The Philadelphia Inquirer's Classical Music Critic David Patrick Stearns, in his review of Monday night's premiere, calls Dr. Atomic "a profound musical and moral journey." He is certain the libretto assembled by Sellars "inspired the composer." Stearns responds as many have to the aria at the end of Act I, in which, he writes of Adams:

He surpasses his considerable self in the operatic lyricism of Donne's "Batter my heart, three-personed God," but also with vocal lines that are dramatically informational rather than poetic. There's little sense of tonal stability—how could there be in characterizing people hurtling into the unknown?—in a score whose central gesture might be called a fantasy on a single repeated chord with alternately dramatic and chaotic rhythms.

Read the full review at philly.com.

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A week before the Doctor Atomic premiere came the release of John Adams's new memoir, Hallelujah Junction, and a companion Nonesuch retrospective album of the same name. It was then that New York's 92nd Street Y hosted a talk between Adams and Ara Guzelimian, dean of The Juilliard School, about the composer's works. The Y has posted a video on its site from their discussion about the opera. Watch at blog.92y.org.