I watched John Adams’ Doctor Atomic again yesterday. Actually this was the first time I’d seen it in its entirety since we left at the interval when it played in the Met “Live in HD” series. This time I was watching a recording of the Nederlandse Opera’s production as broadcast on NPS2 (complete with Dutch subtitles). I think this is the same performance that is available on DVD and Blu Ray; certainly the same cast/production.

I’ve seen and listened to a lot of John Adams’ music since my first exposure to Doctor Atomic including two productions of Nixon in China and a concert compered by the composer so I feel a lot more at home with the style Adams composes in. Also, like many modern works, Doctor Atomic gets easier to grasp musically once heard a couple of times. I found myself liking it quite a lot. I still think the libretto is problematic though I think I see the point of some of the dull bits; the diet scene for example. It seems to be a way of showing how people under great strain behave. I guess it sorta/kinda works. The vocal line can still be a bit dull but the antidote is to let the orchestral accompaniment wash over you. There seems to be a way of listening, not overly analytical, that works for this kind of music.

The Amsterdam (also seen in Chicago and San Francisco) production seemed more dynamic than I remember the Met production being. There’s a lot of use of dance and some pretty garish colour choices. That said, the recording was very heavy on super closeups which made it quite hard to figure out what was going on on stage much of the time. Also, it seemed as if the start and finish had been edited for TV so it wasn’t entirely clear what the audience in the house saw. Needless to say the performances were exemplary as one expects with essentially the cast that created the work and with the very consistent Netherlands Opera Chorus and the Netherlands Philharmonic backing them up.

I guess my revised judgement is that this one of the first significant operas of the century and will likely stay in the repertoire.

So now, an aside. Given that for 300 years Italian and German composers dominated opera composition how come those two countries have produced essentially nothing since 1945? Italy is pretty much batting zero and Germany has a handful of operas by Henze that occasionally get performed. That’s pretty much it. The modern opera stage is dominated by Brits (Britten, Tippett, Maxwell Davies, Weir, Birtwistle, Ades) and Americans (Adams, Glass, Barber, Menotti) with the odd Russian, Frenchman, Argentine and Finn kicking in. The last Italian opera of any consequence premiered in 1926. I think that’s really weird.