The cult American “post-minimalist” John Adams has the knack — like Janacek, say, or even Andrew Lloyd Webber — of choosing intriguing subjects for his work in the theatre. At Houston Grand Opera in 1987, he wowed the opera world with the premiere of his first large-scale work, Nixon in China. I was there, and Nixon remains, for me, Adams’s most successful theatre piece to date, much performed in the original staging by his longtime collaborator Peter Sellars. Nixon in China is a pioneering work, a docu-opera with comic and often touching elements, set to a score of dizzying virtuosity and theatrical energy, enhanced by an important dance element (the original choreography is by Mark Morris, then, like Adams, on the threshold of international celebrity).

The Adams/Sellars/Morris “real life as art” formula was much replicated, not least by Adams and his collaborators, less successfully perhaps, in The Death of Kling- hoffer (1991), a controversial music dramatisation of the hijack of the cruise liner Achille Lauro and the murder of the wheelchair-bound Jewish passenger Leon Klinghoffer by Palestinian terrorists.

Adams’s more recent Doctor Atomic opened on Monday night in a new production at New York’s Metropolitan Opera, just over three years after the world premiere in San Francisco. Sellars’s staging has been seen in Chicago and Amsterdam, but the Met's supremo, Peter Gelb, in collaboration with English National Opera’s John Berry, opted for a new production by the British television director Penny Woolcock, whose acclaimed film of Klinghoffer is widely credited with salvaging the work and laying to rest the smears of anti-semitic partisanship that have dogged its progress in the world’s opera houses. Sellars, the librettist of Doctor Atomic, has enjoyed less than adulatory responses to his recent work, so Gelb and Berry were clearly hoping that Woolcock could work her alchemical magic again, this time in the theatre.

Alas, it wasn’t to be, and the problem, I fear, remains Sellars’s libretto — a lethal concoction of banality and pretension that renders the story of J Robert Oppenheimer and the trial explosion of his atom bomb in the New Mexico desert a dry, overextended sequence of static tableaux morts. In New York, the first-night audience’s response seemed muted after 3½ hours during which very little happens as the characters wait for the bomb to go off and muse on its consequences.

Adams claims not to be political, but his recent work has been buttock-achingly preachy and politically correct. His message, inevitably, is that the invention of the atom bomb was A Very Bad Thing — its creators, Oppenheimer and Edward Teller, realise this too late, of course — and that the destruction of Hiroshima was a crime. The final five minutes are certainly climactic, as a wall-shaking electronic rumble reverberates through the auditorium and the orchestra crescendos to an agonising scream, followed by a numbed pulsing, with the voice-over of a Japanese mother begging for water for her child. This is the only moment that truly tugs at the heartstrings, but it is way too little, way too late.

Certainly, Adams’s score is no mere rerun of his rippling, Jacuzzi-like comfort-bubbling in Nixon and his more accessible concert works. The harmonic language is grittier, more dissonant and less lushly orchestrated, and each of the two 90-minute acts is preceded by apparently random radio noise, as if switching stations on an old-fashioned transistor. Apart from a rapt soliloquy for Kitty Oppenheimer (the lustrous sounding and good-looking young mezzo Sasha Cooke) and a low-lying mantra for her Native American maid, Pasqualita (the booming Meredith Arwady), the vocal writing is instantly forgettable.

Gerald Finley sings and acts with his accustomed dignity and charisma as the atomic bomb’s painfully self-questioning inventor, and there is decent support from Richard Paul Fink (Teller), Earle Patriarco (Frank Hubbard) and Eric Owens (General Groves). Alan Gilbert, the new music director of the New York Philharmonic, gets brilliant playing from the Met Orchestra, but even he, and they, can’t cover up the lazy repetition that is an indivisible component of Adams’s post-minimalist style.

Woolcock’s work — and that of her set and costume designers, Julian Crouch and Catherine Zuber — is solid but hardly earth-shattering. Saddled with Sellars’s nonstarter of a libretto, it probably couldn’t be.

Meanwhile, at home, ENO has a huge — and, to me, unexpected — hit on its hands with Christopher Alden’s enthralling staging of Handel’s tragicomic Partenope. First performed at the King’s Theatre Haymarket in 1730, it shows Handel, bruised after his unsuccessful efforts to keep two warring prima donnas and a high-maintenance castrato happy in the 1720s, adopt a lighter vein, with a brilliant butterfly of a heroine who teasingly flirts with four potential lovers (one of them a woman in drag who is pursuing her own errant squeeze, one of Par- tenope’s suitors).

Musically, the opera is usually deemed to be one of Handel’s better second-ranking efforts, but here, as staged by Alden, conducted by Christian Curnyn and sung by a world-class cast, it stands proud alongside the composer’s masterpieces.

Alden and his designers, Andrew Lieberman and Jon Morrell, transport the action to a self-consciously sophisticated, art-decoish Paris of the 1920s, in which the heroine appears as a Nancy Cunard-like salon diva, as photographed by Man Ray (identified with Partenope’s aggressive suitor, Emilio, here portrayed as a conceptual artist assembling a collage portrait of his hostess). It works brilliantly because Alden catches the principal characters’ posey veneer, which he gradually strips away, exposing their deeper emotions as Handel’s music takes on darker tones. As always with Alden, there are excesses and superimposed jokes, but the comic and serious are kept in a near-ideal balance and a long evening passes in a flash thanks to brilliant acting and glorious singing by Rosemary Joshua (Partenope), Christine Rice (Arsace), Patricia Bardon (Rosmira), Iestyn Davies (amusing and touching as a Chaplinesque Armindo) and John Mark Ainsley (Emilio). Handel hasn’t looked and sounded as good as this in a long time. Not to be missed.

Finally, a brief word about another ENO show on its rounds around the world. David McVicar’s grungy, down-at-heel staging of Massenet’s Manon may not have endured in St Martin’s Lane, but it has succeeded on the road with starrier casts. Last summer, it was filmed in Barcelona with Natalie Dessay and Rolando Villazon, and I caught it, again with Dessay, but this time with Jonas Kaufmann as her infatuated beau, at Lyric Opera of Chicago. They make an ideal pair physically — just over and just under 40, they convince as teenagers in the opening scene — and vocally they are simply today’s dream cast. The soprano musters all the reserves of her characteristically French, silvery tone and her glittering technical armoury in the cavernous but singer-friendly Civic Opera House, while the tenor draws the listener in with his dreamy pianissimo singing and thrills with his visceral, passionate top notes. Covent Garden has a Manon scheduled for Anna Netrebko and Villazon. Let’s hope they book Dessay and Kaufmann for the revival.

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