SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL CONCERT REVIEW
 

John Adams, El Niño : Dawn Upshaw, soprano, Michelle DeYoung, mezzo-soprano, Eric Owens, bass-baritone, Daniel Brubeck, countertenor, Brian Cummings, countertenor, Steven Rickards, countertenor, Westminster Symphonic choir (Joe Miller, conductor), The Brooklyn Youth Chorus (Dianne Berkun, artistic director), Mark Grey, sound design, Orchestra of St. Lukes, conductor John Adams, Isaac Stern Auditorium, Carnegie Hall, New York City, 13.12.2009 (GG)

 

Adams: El Niño: A Nativity Oratorio

 

When John Adams’ El Niño premiered nine years ago, performances featured choreographed dancers and a film (each created by Peter Sellars)  along with soloists, chorus and orchestra. In what is now Sellars’ familiar style the dancers shadowed the singers and commented on the music they expressed, while the silent film presented a narrative about Joseph and a tattooed and pierced Mary as Hispanic teenagers of uncertain immigration status travelling along the highways of Southern California. The film was an especially powerful accompaniment to the music when performed in the United States, a country with a violently ambivalent relationship with its burgeoning Latino population and with a sentimental and politically fraught view of the major Christian religious holidays. Along with the updated staging of this ancient story, Adams and Sellars created a new libretto, one which followed the general plot of the Nativity narrative – the Annunciation, the appearance of the Star in the sky, the adoration of the Magi, the Massacre of the Innocents and the flight to Egypt – but did so by stitching together the gospel with passages from the Apocrypha as well as texts from Martin Luther, Hildegard von Bingen, anonymous early English poetry, the Wakefield mystery plays and various Spanish poets from the 17^th to the 20^th centuries. The story is therefore both familiar and new, with touches of mysticism, earthy love of a mother for a child, eroticism and a very powerful evocation of the massacre of Mexican students in 1968. The first concert impression was of something ambitious, skillful, charged with passionate, almost angry determination, yet so full of information, gesture and sensation that it was a bit overwhelming to experience.

On a recent Sunday evening, Adams brought this work to New York for its first performance at Carnegie Hall, and to conclude the hall’s brief festival devoted to sacred holiday music. The sacred is kept alive through belief and so is a living thing, and although theologically El Niño could be called heretical, it is a living work through which audiences can experience a story sacred to so many. And despite its revisionist nature, it is a non-dogmatic work that seeks neither to argue with traditional texts nor proselytize for itself. It tells the story with a mixture of reverence, sympathy and wonder. This performance was a purely musical presentation, with absolutely no staging save for the minor gesture of keeping the children’s choir off-stage until the concluding section. The focus was solely on the work itself and the performance, and it was a gripping, emotionally powerful and frequently very beautiful concert.

Heard in the context of his works of the past decade, this is vintage Adams, with his particular balance of Minimalist process and Romantic resolution handled so finely that after the opening bars and their familiar combination of chugging, uneven rhythms and slow, descending chromatic gestures one is no longer aware of how the music has been put together but only of its flow and effect. This is a story of young people involved in confusing, unfathomable, beautiful and violent events, and even at the quietest moments of luminous repose, Adams maintains a sensation that something is unsettled, be it the harmony or the rhythm. The musical structure is episodic and the narrative is maintained through the libretto. Adams has become an assured and accomplished conductor of his own works, able to keep a strong pulse at all tempos and levels of polyphonic and polyrhythmic complexity (and this work has a great deal of both) and he maintained an attentive and easy-going hand on the ensembles and the soloists. The piece seemed slightly under-rehearsed and beneficially so; the orchestra was completely alert and light-handedly vigilant in accompaniment, and the vocal soloists, despite being less than certain about a couple of entrances, had an effectively poised nervous energy. In fact they were superb. Dawn Upshaw, who premiered the work, had a fullness and weight to her voice that I have never heard from her before and sang with her usual lyricism; Michelle DeYoung continues to develop a richness both to her instrument and her expression, and her long solo for La Anunciación was intense and spellbinding; and Eric Owens sang with great power, particularly over the boogie-woogie beat of When Herod heard. The countertenors were occasionally lost in the larger instrumental textures but both expressed and blended their strikingly different colors effectively, and the chorus sang with tremendous gusto and body of sound, and even riotous expression when called for (Adams is a very fine choral composer). Unlike standard Nativity narratives, the climax of El Niño is the elision of Herod’s command to kill the children of Bethlehem from Matthew, presented by the chorus, with the long Memorial de Tlatelolco, a poem commemorating the Mexican massacre by Rosario Castellanos, sung with exceptional grace and a kind of fury clothed in despondent beauty by Upshaw. In the coda, the children sing a Spanish song to Mary, while the soloists sing a mystical, Gnostic text about how the baby Jesus brought nourishment to his family as they wandered the desert. These two musics happen simultaneously, and the result is complex yet still transparent and graceful. This is where Adams' and Sellars' achievement becomes clear; they have made this old story new and, far more than placing Julius Caesar in Fascist dress, they have found how actual events in our lives and our era unintentionally retell the Nativity story. They have accomplished the considerable and important feat of making the archetypal relevant. El Niño  heard and seen only as music on stage, is a real contemporary masterpiece, and the audience responded with the kind of slowly building standing ovation that is the mark of those honestly and deeply moved.

 

George Grella