Adams: El Niño offers ancient and modern views of the Nativity
(February 2001)
"John Adams has turned to the ‘greatest story ever told’ for his latest work El Niño…and his high-octane music might have been born to suggest the rapt wonder of this story" wrote the Daily Telegraph after the work’s recent first performance. This new full-evening oratorio for soloists, chorus and orchestra was premiered on 15 December at the Châtelet in Paris, travelled to San Francisco in January and can be heard in Berlin on 15 and 16 April. The premiere featured a starry trio of soloists – Dawn Upshaw, Lorraine Hunt-Lieberson and Willard White – conducted by the longtime Adams interpreter Kent Nagano.
Adams created El Niño with his most frequent collaborator Peter Sellars – they were both drawn to the continuing contemporary relevance of the iconic biblical story, and the everyday miracle that birth still represents. At the Châtelet these themes were woven into a multilayered fabric in the special staging by Sellars, fusing film, dance, voice and gesture. Though launched with full theatrical panache, the oratorio promises to have an equally active life as a work purely for the concert hall.
"John Adams captured the intimacy, mystery and apocalyptic nature of the Nativity story in a thoroughly contemporary idiom, fusing his well-known mimimalist style with a rich blend of text in English, Spanish and Latin, for an effect ultimately as timeless as the story itself… Adams colourfully deployed his orchestral resources, using delicate celesta lines or violent brass to emphasise different parts of the score, while vivid, propulsive rhythm set off the lyricism of the singing." Wall Street Journal
"Where Handel in Messiah stuck rigidly to biblical texts, Adams has cast his net wider, to take in the Gnostic and pseudo gospels, the poetry of Hildegard von Bingen and a brace of Latin-American female poets from the 17th and 20th centuries. El Niño expands the biblical Nativity to become an exploration not just of the miracle of the virgin birth, but of the miraculousness of birth per se… Adams has written some striking solo settings, which came vividly alive in the voices of Dawn Upshaw, Lorraine Hunt-Lieberson and Willard White… There is further meshing of languages old and new, with a medieval-inspired harmonic austerity in the magical close-harmony writing for three countertenors, and the tinklings of a Baroque-like continuo from guitars and electric keyboards." Daily Telegraph
"…[Adams] controls the superimpositions or permutations of scale and mode, the play of diminution and deployment of melodic and rhythmic cells of this score that seems to mark a return to a repetitive idiom, while at the same time mixing styles and languages in virtuosic fashion. Difficult to speak any longer of minimalism in hearing this art of polyphony that borrows from the Middle Ages as much as Ligeti, its science of counterpoint, its movement of dynamic crescendos and decrescendos, its ostinatos that seem to be slowed by trills wedged into a regular pulsation. Equal attention to detail and transparency characterises the vocal writing, alternately homophonic and arioso, sliding among the incisive strokes of winds and brass or gliding on the refined strings." La Liberation
"El Niño sounds at first hearing to be one of Adams’s most inventive and fertile scores. It’s not just the rhythms that are, as ever, fascinating, but the textures, as complex in their way as Birtwistle’s – just how are they assembled? There is also a vein of simple, heartfelt lyricism that is perhaps new." The Times
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