THIS month's offering relayed live from the New York Metropolitan Opera at Cineworld Sheffield on Saturday is Doctor Atomic by American composer John Adams.
Like two of his other operas, his first in 1987, Nixon in China, and The Death of Klinghoffer his rather more controversial second in 1991, it is considered a modern opera classic.
Premiered at the San Francisco Opera on October 1 2005, Doctor Ato
mic is his last but one to date and centres on the creation of the atom bomb by American physicist Robert Oppenheimer.
Its libretto, constructed by radical American stage director Peter Sellars, draws largely on declassified US government documentation, scientific and military, at the time of the bomb's development in 1945.
Other texts used, poetry by Baudelaire, John Donne and Muriel Rukeyser, part of the Bhagaviad Gita and a traditional Tewa Indian song, usually reflect the individual anxieties and tensions of those involved.
The first act takes place a month before the bomb, "gadget" as it is referred to, is due to be tested and the second on the day of the test, July 15 1945.
Sellars directed the first production, since seen in Chicago and Netherlands Opera in 2007, but the Met staging is new and a joint production with English National Opera where it opens next February.
It is directed by British film director Penny Woolcock and the cast has a number of singers who have been associated with the opera throughout, including noted Canadian baritone Gerald Finley as Oppenheimer.
Debuting in the role of Oppenheimer's wife Kitty is mezzo soprano Sasha Cooke who, with another ever-present, tenor Thomas Glenn (Robert Wilson) and Finley, are also in the ENO performances.
Eric Gilbert, music director-elect of the New York Philharmonic, is the conductor at the Met.
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