Dr. Atomic

I received a call from my friend about an hour and a half before this show was due to start saying that he had an extra ticket. So, after rushing back to my room from the practice center, which ironically is less than five minutes from the opera house so sort of an unfortunate timing, we set out again.
Now, I went into this opera with high expectations. I’d heard good things about it, and the subject matter (the development of the atomic bomb) looked quite interesting. In other words, I had an open mind. However, after sitting through the entire thing, I can say it is probably one of the two or three worst performances for which I have ever paid money to see. The production itself was as good as could be expected (it is the Metropolitan Opera, after all) but the story line was close to incoherent, it’s debatable whether those notes could even be counted as ‘music’, and the words would probably have been more eloquent if someone had just repeatedly opened a dictionary at random and picked whatever happened to be at the top of each page. One of my friends left at the intermission.

I honestly don’t understand modern art. It’s as though all semblance of skill has been replaced with weirdness. John Adams (the composer) has some good pieces – I’ve played several – but this is not one of them. Someone is going to read this and say similar things were written about, for example, The Rite of Spring, but can an objective case really be made that such a piece is actually an IMPROVEMENT on anything written by Chopin or Mozart? It’s as though art in general is engaged in an exponential free fall where the only goal is to be more obnoxiously strange than the next person in line.