El Nino

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Opera as an art from in general is something that has real problems with the contemporary. There seems to be something about it that it way too redolent of eighteenth and nineteenth century ideas of stagecraft and performance and composition and the attempts to create that kind of Gesamtkunstwerk, the 'total work of art' that would surpass everything else. The late twentieth, and now early twenty-first, centuries however have more successfully focussed on tiny, intimate, plural narratives and designs. Yet at the same time there is also something very contemporary about the idea: mixing media, blurring the boundaries between genres.

It is perhaps this latter idea that has appealed to the more successful composers of contemporary opera, the best of whom have made a notable break with tradition. Philip Glass' 'Satyagraha' (eight hours plus about Gandhi) or 'Einstein on the Beach', Thomas AdEes' 'Powder Her Face' (probably the only opera in which blow jobs feature heavily) and Adams' own 'Nixon in China' are probably the most notable in the genre.

When Adams however announces his attention to write a modern 'Messiah' in two different languages (English and Spanish), using texts from nine different sources spanning twenty different centuries (from the Apocrypha to Hildegard von Bingen to Sor Juana InEs de la Cruz), a German orchestra (the fine Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin), three different choirs (the Theatre of Voices, the London Voices and the children of the Maitrise de Paris), some celebrity soloists (Dawn Upshaw and Willard White), with dancers and video screens and have the whole kaboodle directed by Peter Sellars, the alarm bells are shrieking in horror at the potential for overblown nonsense.

The whole show was only ever performed once (in Paris in December 2000), and it's not clear whether anyone will ever have the budget to mount such an undertaking again, but at least we have a recording of it. Yes, that is indeed something to be thankful for because Adams manages to avoid the worst potential excesses and craft a warm, human tale around some fascinating and genuinely moving music.

The piece starts with the huge, pumping D-minor chord of 'I Sing of a Maiden' then takes us through the whole Nativity tale at alarming pace, climaxing toward the end of the first section in 'Shake the Heavens' (which almost manages to do that) and the gorgeous 'A Christmas Star' with its classic structure gradually overtaken by intrusive violin pings that sound like shooting stars and a slow Latin text sung against the movement of the piece.

The second part (and second CD) isn't as immediate as the first part and doesn't keep up the marvellous pace, yet its more introspective atmosphere (it deals with Herod's slaying of the children and the prefiguring of Christ's own death partly by using Rosario Castellanos' deeply emotional and highly politically charged texts about Mexico) rewards careful listening. Small jewels, like the details in some of the Mexican paintings on the sleeve, are revealed: the beautiful guitar on 'Pues Esta Tiritando' or the childrens' voices winding around the final 'A Palm Tree', gradually taking over to finish the colossal work on an intimate pianissimo note.

Traces of the stage production remain in the way that some of the voices are mixed way up front, dominating so much as to drown out some of the fascinating textural detail in the music (the orchestra, unusually also includes 'celeste and sampler', unfortunately difficult to pick out), and some passages seem to have a fairly perfunctory narrative function that could possibly have been left out on disc to make a higher-impact piece of music, but then if you're going to record the whole thing, you might as well do it properly.
It came out last December, but an opera like this is for life, not just for Christmas.