English National Opera, the Coliseum, London 25, 28* Feb; 5, 7, 11, 13, 16, 18, 20 Mar 7pm (*6pm)

Gerald Finley, Sasha Cooke, Thomas Glenn, Brindley Sherratt, Jonathan Veira
Lawrence Renes (conductor)
Penny Woolcock (director)

Boom! John Adams's explosive 2005 opera, getting its UK premiere here, covers the hours leading up to the first nuclear test in 1945.

Adams has created a unique kind of opera-meets-newsreel genre of his own: his two previous operas dealt with Nixon's meeting with Mao in 1972 (Nixon in China, 1987) and the Palestinian hijacking of the cruise ship the Achille Lauro in 1985 (Death of Klinghoffer, 1991). Like them, Dr Atomic is not history-with-tunes, but an examination of characters coping with new situations - or, as Adams puts it, 'three hours of men arguing', the main arguer being J Robert Oppenheimer, the multi-lingual, well-read, driven brains behind the bomb.

First, the (relatively minor) problems. Peter Sellars's magpie libretto fizzles out. It mixes transcripts and direct quotes with the poetry of Donne and Baudelaire and the Bhagavad Gita. Like a Californian sausage-and-strawberry pizza, the mix is too much. The direct quotes prove unsettable, clumsy and unlyrical. Still, there's something of a novelty value in hearing how a composer sets "the 32 points are the centers of the 20 triangular faces of an icosahedron interwoven with the 12 pentagonal faces of a dodecahedron".

Some parts drag, and the scenes with the wine-swigging, love-hungry Mrs Oppenheimer don't feel like they relate. The vocal lines are largely tough-edged, grey and unmemorable: fantastic for building tension but hardly reproducible in the shower next morning.

But what fabulous, fantastic orchestral music! This is Adams's best opera score to date. There are fleeting glimpses of many styles - Ellingtonian dazzle, 1970s TV cop-show theme urgency, filmic poignancy, or baroque magnificence (in the moving 'Batter my heart' aria at the end of Act I) - but it's all Adams. He keeps up the tension while moving things on with great excitement: a science lab full of brilliant, expectant young minds cross-talking in music.

And the end - when the bomb goes off - is well judged. No 'orchestral explosion', but subdued, weirdly colourful percussion clockwork counting the seconds to the big bang. When the flash comes, accompanied by recorded thundering, it's brilliant in all senses, and the opera fades poignantly to the sound of a Japanese woman asking for water for her children.
The set is mighty, with a backdrop of mid-air debris, suggestive of an explosion in freeze-frame, and drapes that hint at the desert mountains. The researchers are up in pigeonholes, each with a blackboard, decorated by frequent back-projections of handwritten formulae and burning maps of Hiroshima. The costumes are great, brown and grey materials in full fifties flow. Full marks to designer Julian Crouch and director Penny Woolcock.

Performances are outstanding all round. Oppenheimer is brilliantly sung by Canadian baritone Gerald Finley, who's been in every performance since that 2005 premiere, especially in that moving 'Batter my heart'. Sasha Cooke as his wife brought passion and vulnerability, while Brindley Sherratt's strong, ironic Teller was an absolute delight. Jonathan Veira's General Groves was the perfect do-as-I-say brasshat demanding a good weather forecast, shouty and imperious without ever descending to caricature, and Thomas Glenn's Wilson entirely convinced as the fresh voice of youthful conscience. Haunting work too from Meredith Arwady as the Tewa Indian maid, her low notes an ominous warning from the local tribe.

If you're looking for romantic tunes, look elsewhere: it's not Puccini. But if you want something uniquely 21st-century, tense and gripping, with brilliantly inventive music by a modern master, taste this special experience now.

Rob Ainsley