OK, so just to show that I listen to more than alcohol-abusing post-punk rockers from the 80s who measure their success in the volume of their own vomit...
Tonight I caught the final performance of SF's world premiere of the new John Adams' opera,
Doctor Atomic, at the SF Opera House. Some great performances by the orchestra, some interesting set work, and the performers do a nice job. But yet as compelling as a storyline as this should be ... about the birth of the nuclear age ... the opera is pretty lame.
The lines are borrowed too much from reality, so we hear a lot of singing about kilotons of TNT and dodecahedrons. Freakish. I used to work at a high-energy physics lab and know a number of Edward Teller's personal associates. And yet even I thought it was a bit too scientific and contrived for opera.
Even weirder is knowing all of these characters through my previous work in high-energy physics. Imagine going to an opera about Juve winning their 26th Scudetto on May 5, 2002, with cast members playing the roles of Lippi, DP, Davids, etc. Then you might get a sense of how bizarre it is for me to see uber-geeks and the collective scientific community they built up, a community I was once a cousin to, turned into an art form.
It will be touring the U.S. from here. If you have the chance to see it, skip it and watch the outstanding 1981 documentary
The Day After Trinity instead. If your musical entertainment tries too hard to be factual, you'd be far better off sticking to the facts and leave the music behind.
Buy on AliExpress.com
is pretty much banned on some of these... everyone shares lossless shn and flac files (which you can convert with the mkw Audio Compression Tool , etc.). The result is massive access to obscure recordings with a quality level you cannot even purchase on a lameass service like iTunes or Rhapsody.
