Christopher Nolan’s enormously successful 2023 film, Oppenheimer (seven Oscars, seven Golden Globes, five BAFTAs) about the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the American theoretical physicist who helped develop the first nuclear weapons during World War II, featured a score by Ludwig Göransson. Unusually, Göransson began writing before filming started and Göransson has described the process as open and very collaborative, so that Nolan began filming with two or three hours of music that he could reference and the film never used temp track. The soundtrack was recorded by the Hollywood Studio Orchestra.
Göransson was born in Sweden and studied at the Stockholm Royal College of Music before studying on the University of Southern California Scoring for Motion Picture and Television program. Soon after graduating, he began work assisting Theodore Shapiro, a composer known for films such as The Devil wears Prada.
On 7 November 2024 there is a chance to relive the magic in a different form as Göransson’s Oppenheimer Suite receives its UK premiere at the Royal College of Music when Ben Palmer conducts the RCM Philharmonic in a concert which also features John Adams Doctor Atomic Symphony and Takemitsu’s luminous Spirit Garden, one of his last works.
John Adams’ opera Doctor Atomic premiered at San Francisco in 2005 and deals with some of the same themes as Oppenheimer, though Adams and his librettist Peter Sellars with Oppenheimer as the leading character. Adams’ Doctor Atomic Symphony was premiered in 2007 by the BBC Symphony Orchestra at the BBC Proms with the composer conducting, though Adams later revised the work, reducing it in length by nearly half.
Full details of the concert from the RCM website.
