John Adams’s opera Doctor Atomic, approaching its third birthday, is arriving in Britain in stages. Last year’s Proms hosted the premiere of a symphonic potpourri. Now we get a DVD of Peter Sellars’s original staging, as performed last summer at Netherlands Opera. The real thing arrives at English National Opera next February, in a staging by Penny Woolcock. Britain gets there eventually.

Doctor Atomic is a big, serious piece: rightly so, when the topic’s the first atom bomb test in 1945. Adams’s score is strong on atmosphere and gesture (grinding sci-fi dissonances, nighttime anguish), but weaker on lyrical flights that might give vent to the feelings bubbling inside J. Robert Oppenheimer (Gerald Finley) and the drama’s other players. And if Adams’s notes don’t cramp their style, Sellars’s text, a mix of official quotations, poetry, and waffle, often will. Even Puccini would falter over a line such as “I keep in constant touch with a team of psychiatrists at Oak Ridge.”

The big exception is Oppenheimer’s Batter my heart, three-person’d God, a baroque-flavoured aria of torment obviously inspired by Lorraine Hunt Lieberson’s anguished arias in past Sellars productions. That is a terrific, moving sequence.

The heart throbs too in scenes featuring Jessica Rivera as Oppenheimer’s wife, the opera’s symbol of warmth, sensuousness, and hope. But these are moments: the overall tone stays cool, intellectual. We watch as observers, not participants.

Sellars directed this TV version himself. There are virtues here, and vices. Cinema aficionados dismayed by static shots may revel in the nervous visuals, the quick editing and close-ups (you grow very familiar with Rivera’s tongue). But by fidgeting so much, Sellars the film director often works against the interests of Sellars the stage director. Body movements are truncated; the patterns of Lucinda Childs’s choreography get lost. All too rarely do we grasp the big picture and enjoy the full impact of Adrianne Lobel’s stark sets, with desert hills silhouetted and the bomb, cradled with wires, looming overhead like a malevolent planet.

Finley, Rivera, Eric Owens and the rest of the cast are always as eloquent as the opera allows, and Lawrence Renes’s conducting is on the ball. Extras are disappointing: too much of Sellars holding forth, not enough on the production.

(OpusArte, TMS £29.99, call 0845 6026328)

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