John Adams
Doctor Atomic Symphony
Born: Worcester, Massachusetts, February 15, 1947
Now resides: Berkeley, California
First performance: August 21, 2007, in London; the composer conducted the BBC Symphony Orchestra
Scoring: Piccolo and two flutes, the second player doubling on another piccolo; three oboes, the third doubling on English horn; three clarinets, the third doubling on bass clarinet; three bassoons, the third doubling on contrabassoon; four horns; four trumpets, the fourth doubling on piccolo trumpet in B-flat; three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, celesta, and strings
Performance time: Approximately 24 minutes

Of all compositional genres, opera calls forth music’s story-telling potential most effectively. Opera has enjoyed a remarkable resurgence of interest on the part of today’s composers, with ambitious new works appearing annually. And no contemporary composer has written for the operas house with such striking results as John Adams.
Adams is widely recognized as the pre-eminent American composer of his generation. Colorful, energetic, and accessible in the best sense of that term, his music enjoys the virtues of different traditions: the expansive sonic architecture of the Romantic masters, the harmonic sophistication of 20th-century composers, the rhythmic vitality of American popular music, the shimmering textures of the so-called “minimalist” school, and the delight in new discoveries that has always characterized the American avant-garde.
To date, Adams has written four full-length operas. Three of these—Nixon in China (1987), The Death of Klinghoffer 1991), and Doctor Atomic (2005)—examine pivotal events in 20th-century history, presenting them not in documentary fashion but in mythic and poetic terms. Doctor Atomic concerns the final days of the Manhattan Project, the American effort during World War II to create an atomic bomb, and concludes with the detonation of the world’s first nuclear device, in July 1945, in the New Mexico desert.
Following the initial production of Doctor Atomic, mounted by the San Francisco Opera in October 2005, Adams adapted portions of his score as an orchestral work. The resulting Doctor Atomic Symphony premiered last summer in London.
The composer provided the following description of his work:

The symphony is cast in a sustained, 25-minute single-movement arch, not unlike the Sibelius Symphony No. 7, a work that has had an immense effect on my compositional thinking. The opening, with its pounding timpani and Varèse-like jagged brass fanfares, conjures a devastated post-nuclear landscape. The frenzied "panic music" that follows comes from one of Act Two's feverish tableaux that evoke the fierce electrical storm that lashed the test site in the hours before the bomb's detonation. The ensuing music is taken from moments that describe the intense activity leading up to the test. One hears the U.S. Army General Leslie Groves, here impersonated in the boorish trombone music, berating both the scientists and his military subordinates, music that gives way to the ritual "corn dance" of the local Tewa Indians. The symphony concludes with an instrumental treatment of the opera's most memorable moment, a setting (originally for baritone voice, here played by solo trumpet) of John Donne's holy sonnet, "Batter my heart, three person'd God." This is the poem that the physicist hero of the opera, J. Robert Oppenheimer, loved, and that inspired him to name the desert test site "Trinity."


Program notes © 2008 by Paul Schiavo

Reprinted with permission from the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra