John Adams - Dr Atomic Symphony/Guide to Strange Places
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Music CD Cover Artist: John Adams Brand: Adams Conductor: David Robertson Orchestra: St. Louis Symphony Orchestra Edition: Music CD Audio: English (Unknown) CD Release Date: 2009-07-28 Music Label: Nonesuch Soundtracks:
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| New | New Usually ships in 1-2 business days | $11.39 | ||
| Used | Used Usually ships in 1-2 business days | $9.65 |
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Free Music Notes for Dr Atomic Symphony/Guide to Strange Places Album
Free Music Review: Impressions: Adam's Tone Poems
Hit: 5 Stars
Imagine yourself on a whirlwind tour around the world's notable geological formations. Everything becomes a blur with no time to savor one place before helter-skelter we are off to another peculiar site. "If it's Tuesday, it must be Belgium" sort of adventure. This is the planned effect of the second work on this album, Guide to Strange Places. The composition is in fact based on Adams discovery of a French tour book translated as A Black Guide to Mysterious Provence, with a chapter on "strange places." This is no Pictures at an Exhibition, and no recurrent theme exists. It is a strange but highly interesting work in its own right. We are uncomfortable with the momentum and the lack of resolution or anything on which to support us: it is another one of Adam's wild rides with rich orchestration.
The album begins with a symphonic suite derived from Adam's opera Doctor Atomic. Most of us of a certain age are familiar with the tragic story of J. [Julius] Robert Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project. The opera and symphony focuses on the period before the first atomic test explosion and all the doubts and fears of what might occur. The music is filled with dread, energy, power, and future repercussions. The liner notes, written by Jeremy Denk, give a thorough musical analysis of both works like some baseball radio narrator. Both compositions are, in essence, tone poems: impressions of imagined places and historic situations. They are adventurous scoring, and give us another Age of Anxiety, mysterious, uncertain, and contemporary.