El Niño by John Adams (review)

John Adams and Peter Sellars have a history of presenting musical theatrical works that take established notions about genre and turn them on their ear. The pair initially rocketed to infamy in 1987 by setting President Nixon’s historic 1972 meeting with Mao Tse-tung as an opera. Nixon in China was an immediate success not only for its ripped-from-the-headlines subject matter, but for its postminimalist musical settings as well. Two projects soon followed that engaged ever closer historical events: the opera The Death of Klinghoffer (1991) about the 1985 hijacking of the Achille Lauro and the song play I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky (1995) set after the 1994 Los Angeles earthquake. By the new millennium, Adams and Sellars had charted such a clear trajectory that observers could rightfully expect another “CNN opera,” as detractors sneeringly termed their work. Then they took a swerve with El Niño. Instead of a fully-staged operatic work on recent events, El Niño was a flexible oratorio, designed to present the Nativity of Jesus Christ either in a concert setting or as a staged work. Here was a major departure, one that aroused many critics’ curiosity before the work premiered nine days before Christmas in 2000. It turns out that not that much had changed. Adams and Sellars may have shifted genre and time period, but they were still busy thwarting convention. Instead of taking the Nativity story from the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, they elected to present the story from a female point of view. The narrative still proceeds from the Annunciation to Mary through Jesus’s birth and on to the Massacre of the Innocents under Herod and the flight to Egypt. However, the texts that relate the story range from the “gnostic” gospels of the Apocrypha to settings of Latin chant by Hildegard von Bingen to the Spanish poems of Rosario Castellanos. This patchwork of texts provides shifting perspectives and opens up the Nativity to new dimensions and revelations.

Sellars’s staging of El Niño captures the work’s multiple ways of seeing by placing the action in three areas. First are the singers on stage, clad in solid colors with only a chair for a prop. Above them hangs the second area, a giant screen that continually projects a film of extremely shaky footage of modern life that augments the sung text. Rounding out the presentation are dancers who weave among the singers, acting as Greek chorus and expressing the principal characters’ inner feelings. While undoubtedly effective for a theatrical audience, it represents the weakest part of Arthaus Musik’s DVD release. When the camera lingers on Dawn Upshaw as she sings the “Magnificat,” we are unable to see the images projected above her, and when the camera pulls back to show us the entire stage, the screen images and the singers’ faces are slightly washed out. A mobile camera with well-chosen shots is pivotal for the effectiveness of a home viewing experience, but for El Niño it becomes a liability. In effect, it takes the multiple perspectives central to the work and forces us to only see one.

Faring much better than the visuals is the DVD’s sound. Arthaus presents two sound mixes, in 2.0 and 5.0 surround. The 5.0 mix does not make good use of the back channels to create an immersive experience and places most of the singing in the generally poorer center channel. In contrast, the stereo mix provides a resonance and depth not even found on Nonesuch’s audio release (Nonesuch 79634). It ably highlights Dawn Upshaw’s, Willard White’s, and Lorraine Hunt Lieberson’s captivating performances and the clarity of the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin under Kent Nagano’s baton. These performers were ideal for making Adams’s complex score sound easy and natural, especially the powerful...