![]() ![]() There is an inexplicably lovely choral ode to the bomb’s thirty-two-pointed explosive shell, with unison female voices floating above lush string-and-wind chords and glitterings of chimes and celesta. Scene after scene glows with strange energy. ![]() Rehearsals for the première revealed “Atomic” to be not only an ominous score but also an uncommonly beautiful one. ![]() Even as the hot gleam of the highway gave way to desolate roads and fenced-off military zones, Adams’s characteristic musical gestures-the rich-hued harmonies and bopping rhythms that have made repertory items of “Harmonielehre,” “Nixon in China,” and “Short Ride in a Fast Machine”-disintegrated into broken clockwork rhythms, acid harmonies, and electronic noise. In the course of chronicling the first production of “Atomic,” at the San Francisco Opera in 2005, I had arranged to visit the Trinity site, and brought with me the composer’s computer realization of his score. I first heard John Adams’s “Doctor Atomic”-an opera set in the days and hours leading up to the first nuclear test, on July 16, 1945-while driving toward the patch of New Mexico desert where the detonation took place. The music in “Atomic” is ominous, but also uncommonly beautiful. ![]()
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