![]() ![]() I put everything into it, and I'm wrung out by the end."įinley's got a cigarette in his hand for most of the time he's on stage - a prop cigarette, which, thanks to the "magic of theatre" he doesn't have to actually smoke. He's on the entire first act, and he's very tense. "The role is really demanding because it goes from absolute top to absolute bottom. Everyone in this piece is stretched, in a good way," says Finley, who is singing at the top of his range as Oppenheimer. "John Adams does not stint on the vocal demands, or indeed the musical demands. Even if that part sometimes feels like the nightly equivalent of a triathlon. The Death of Klinghoffer) has written a part just for them. He's not complaining, of course not many singers can say that John Adams, opera's great chronicler of modern history (he also composed While rehearsingĭoctor Atomic with the English National Opera - the most difficult role in his repertoire - he's also been singing a scene-stealing part in Erich Korngold's In fact, Finley seems remarkably hearty, given that he's in the middle of a punishing schedule - the equivalent, for an opera singer, of running competitive 400-yard-dashes for a month. We're done.' " Sometimes his primary school would hold duck-and-cover drills, although, like most kids who lived through the Cold War (John Adams included), he doesn't seem to have suffered any ill effects. "When you heard it," says Finley, "you'd think, 'Well, that's it. All it took was a thunderstorm to set it off. When Finley was a child in Ottawa, there was an air-raid siren at the end of his street. That's certainly true of Gerald Finley, the Canadian baritone who originated the role of Oppenheimer four years ago and has now brought his highly praised performance to London. Since the end of the Second World War, the world has lived in the shadow of the calculations, miscalculations and agonizing of the scientists who developed the atomic bomb at Los Alamos. The scientists quail as a roll of electronic thunder fills the auditorium, followed by a searing flash of white light and the nuclear age begins. terrible with fangs, O master, all the worlds are fear-struck, even as I am." He is the Doctor Atomic of the title, and his fears, drawn from the Hindu holy book Bhagavad Gita, have just been powerfully sung by the chorus: "At the sight of this, your shape stupendous. Robert Oppenheimer, who has been neither eating nor sleeping properly, and whose certainty about the project has been eroded to the point where his superiors in the U.S. Will it cause a chain reaction that sets the Earth's atmosphere on fire? Will they all be incinerated, or die of radiation poisoning? At the centre of the group is their leader, J. None of them knows what will happen when they detonate "the gadget" in the New Mexico desert. On stage, the scientists of the Manhattan Project slowly sink to their knees, covering their eyes with goggles that will, they hope, protect them from the effects of the world's first atomic bomb. ![]() It is the British premiere of John Adams's operaĭoctor Atomic, and the London Coliseum is filled with the urgent, amplified sound of clocks ticking, out of sync. ![]()
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