Debuting opera fails to connect to audience

Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt defines the Bard’s history plays as “taking the audience back into a time that had dropped away from living memory but that was still eerily familiar and crucially important.”

That’s the spirit of John Adams’ “Doctor Atomic,” an opera about physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer and the making of the bomb.

The opera is also about: the folly of trying to harness volatile nature; empty relationships in our modern world; and assuming we can control mankind’s morality with the same precision that we engineer the ultimate weapon of mass destruction.

It’s a lot to cover, even in a three-hour evening.

Premiered in San Francisco in 2005, “Doctor Atomic” was given its local premiere by the mighty forces of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, its superlative chorus, conductor Robert Spano and the definitive cast of singers.

And Friday in Symphony Hall, “Doctor Atomic” wasn’t just about history, it felt like a historic event for Atlanta: a grand and head-spinning new opera by America’s leading composer, who was in the audience and received the most bravos at the end.

All true, yet, frustratingly, the ASO’s semi-staged production couldn’t fully connect with the audience, which gave it mostly polite applause at the end.

Two factors might explain this. The biggest is the opera’s own limitations. Librettist Peter Sellars stitched together a high-anxiety tale drawing from Manhattan Project archival documents, diaries and relevant poetry.

And where Act 1 follows a compelling narrative thread, with gripping music to match, Act 2 is a hazy meditation on time standing still, waiting for the big bang.

Did the creators aim higher than they could deliver? In trying to elevate these atomic overachievers into men and women of mythic stature, they hollowed them out.

The more incidental limitation was James Alexander’s stage direction. The singers, lightly amplified, were stationed on a platform at the back of the stage.

Visual projections clarified the action: photos from Los Alamos, a picture of lightning during the storm or a map of Japan when bombing targets were discussed.

Alexander had the singers focus their attention directly toward the audience, as in a concert oratorio, rather than to each other. This compounded the libretto’s fundamental communication problem.

Thus when Oppenheimer (baritone Gerald Finley) and his wife, Kitty (soprano Jessica Rivera), sang their kinky-intellectual love duet —- poetry by Baudelaire and Muriel Rukeyser, respectively —- they stood far apart, draining the music’s pent-up sexual energy.

A pity it didn’t come off as intense drama, because this is some of Adams’ most bewitchingly beautiful and emotionally fraught music.

The Atlanta cast, even the smaller parts, had all sung “Atomic” before, bringing depth to their interpretations.

Rivera’s voluptuous soprano, with a hint of melancholy in her tone, made Kitty a woman of strength and pathos.

Finley, who created the role of Oppenheimer, sang with a chestnut mellow baritone and offered the opera’s most perfectly realized aria, “Batter My Heart.”

CONCERT REVIEW

John Adams’ “Doctor Atomic” Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, Friday in Symphony Hall.