25 days to the Doctor Atomic premiere!

Richard Paul Fink stalked across the makeshift staging area, a ringer for Edward Teller. Gerald Finley evoked a spindly J. Robert Oppenheimer with his porkpie hat and cigarette. Sasha Cooke lounged in a long robe and espadrilles, capturing the forever thirsty Kitty Oppenheimer as she reached for her prop martini glass. And Meredith Arwady stood among them and hit the long, languid notes of a lullaby rendered dark by knowledge of her employer’s work.

“Oh, my little one,” Arwady sang, drawing the notes out across octaves. While later in the month the singers will rehearse with the Met Orchestra, for now it was a piano that kept time and tune in the background. “Oh, oh, my little one,” she repeated. Then she doubled over.

“That is the hardest part by far,” Arwady said, having finished the phrase. “That was so hard to memorize. I spent several months of my life on that!” Arwady sat down in one of the rehearsal room folding chairs. “That passage is only one word,” she continued. “It’s nine and a half pages of music but it’s only one word. So you can’t think of words for the different notes, you just kind of have to keep going.”

Arwady wiped her hands on her knees. “You find your own internal rhythm so it doesn’t look like you’re desperately counting. But of course, on some level, you are.” Jessica Rivera, covering for Cooke, nodded. Sheaves of Adams’s music were spread across Rivera’s lap. “I’d say by about the 800th time I got it right,” Arwady continued. “But the good news with something so difficult to learn is—once you do know it, you really know it well. It’s in your head. If you ever need it, it’s there.”

Gerald Finley, the Canadian baritone who is singing the title part of Oppenheimer, marched across the subterranean rehearsal room, the porkpie hat of his character bobbing amid the other men of the atomic stage. He jerked an unlit cigarette in and out of his mouth.

Piano notes lurked and crept as Finley sang, finally crashing as he upbraided Fink’s Teller. Fink, in turn, described the wages being taken as to whether the bomb would ignite the atmosphere, “destroying just New Mexico, or the entire world.” Finley turned on his heel, jerked his cigarette from his mouth and walked away, following one of the fluorescent lines of tape used to block scenes in rehearsal. Alan Gilbert, who is conducting the Met’s Doctor Atomic (and will join the New York Philharmonic as Music Director in 2009), gently carved his hands through the air. Finley, as the chronic smoker Oppenheimer, staged a silent coughing fit. The sounds of the orchestra built to a crescendo.

“Trying to get a right degree of balance between all the different parts of his life is the biggest challenge of playing this guy,” Finley said after the rehearsal. “He was a scientist, he was a mystic, he was fascinated with French poetry. His spiritual life was based on poetry as well as his knowledge of Sanskrit for the Bhagavad Gita.” Finley smiled faintly as he listed the many interests, the mind itself, behind Oppenheimer’s towering intellect.

“So we’re trying to make sure those elements of his strength and support and where he found inspiration are there, balanced with the scientific knowledge that he had and also his ability to control and manage men of equal brilliance. All together that’s a wonderful challenge on stage.”

Listen to baritone Gerald Finley talk about the “wonderful challenge” of performing Adams’s opera.

Listen to baritone Richard Paul Fink on Edward Teller’s “odd sense of humor”.

This entry was posted by Caroline Cooper on Thursday, September 18th, 2008 at 1:02 pm and is filed under Doctor Atomic Blog, 2008-09 Season. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.