KEY POINTS:
If you feel NBR New Zealand Opera's 2009 season is stranded in the 19th century, then the latest offering from New York's Metropolitan Opera will assure you that opera is a viable entity for our times.
Let the cinema be your opera house. Pop into the Rialto or the Bridgeway and catch John Adams' Doctor Atomic.
Here is a composer who favours testy topics, from Nixon's 1972 visit to China (Nixon in China) and the 1985 hijacking of the Achille Lauro (The Death of Klinghoffer). Doctor Atomic tracks the build-up to the launching of the first atom bomb in Los Alamos in 1945.
At the helm of this Met production of Adams' new opera is film-maker Penny Woolcock, best known for her searing 2003 televising of The Death of Klinghoffer.
Her own films follow the leads of Ken Loach and Mike Leigh in exposing the various social malaises plaguing Britain.
Woolcock is a radical, a self-confessed hip-hop fan who tells me how she surprised her Met colleagues by going off to a Motorhead concert.
Yet she confesses that she "often weeps at classical concerts and opera because of the complete assault on the senses, which is why I love them".
For Woolcock, opera is far from conservative. "You see people singing in this extraordinary full-on way, acting out these stories which are almost always about extreme things".
Doctor Atomic focuses on scientist Robert Oppenheimer, with his anguish and self-doubts caught in settings of John Donne, brought to transcendent life by Canadian baritone Gerald Finley. Finley has been with the opera since its 2005 premiere and will take the stage again next month when Woolcock mounts it for the English National Opera. "He knew the part inside out," the director says. "What's more, having studied biochemistry, he understood the science
of it all much better than I did.
"We watched films of Oppenheimer and could see he was a restless, nervous man. The choreographer worked out a spiral thing where Gerald was always moving, creating a very twitchy character, with one leg wrapped around the other, giving him the feeling of being slightly ill at ease."
If sung dialogue is not always convincing, outbursts of song invariably are, especially those that catch the complex character of Kitty Oppenheimer, played by mezzo Sasha Cooke "who has the sensuality and capacity to surrender which goes so well with the music that John has written".
The other woman in the opera is Meredith Arwady who plays the Oppenheimers' Indian maid, Pasqualita. Her lullaby delivers unsettling images of cloud-flower blossoms and she is, as Woolcock puts it, "the voice of her people".
"On the one hand the Native Americans were a menial presence, on the other they offered an alternative cosmology."
On the staging side, some scenes are dominated by a giant, suspended bomb, others by a grid of singers and actors, inspired by the prefabricated buildings constructed to house Los Alamos workers.
"We wanted to create a sense of something that was modest in construction," Woolcock explains.
"All those souls crammed into tiny spaces, destroying this very peaceful
landscape."
In the final count, it is not difficult to see that Woolcock's ultimate hero is composer John Adams.
"He may have come out of the minimalist tradition, but I think he's a miracle composer," she laughs.
"I love the fact he doesn't despise the audience and you don't have to be a special kind of person to understand his music. There are incidents that are quite jazzy; in various parts you can hear Miles Davis, Schoenberg, Wagner and Puccini. It's shameless and I like that about it."
Opera
What: Metropolitan Opera production of Doctor Atomic, by John Adams.
Where and when: Rialto and Bridgeway Cinemas, to January 28; also playing in Rialto Tauranga, Victoria Cinema, Hamilton; check nzmetopera.com for times.
On the web: See doctor-atomic.com for information about the opera.
On disc: The Death of Klinghoffer DVD (Decca 074 189-9, through Universal Music).
