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SYMPHONY REVIEW
Adams' Nativity Epic In The Homely Here And Now
January 13, 2001
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By Robert P. Commanday
Normally, when a musical theater production drops below the visual tolerance level, it is possible to look away and focus wholly on the music. That option was not feasible in the John Adams/Peter Sellars nativity extravaganza, El Niño, performed by the San Francisco Symphony, Kent Nagano conducting, heard Saturday. There wasn't that much music to listen to in a score that seemed largely a recycling of Adams' earlier music. The performance, yes, the excellences of the mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt, the soprano Dawn Upshaw, the bass Willard White, the trios of countertenors and dancers, the finely honed Symphony Chorus and the Piedmont (Children's) Chorus trotted on to put the sentimental clincher on the final number, were all well-worth hearing– if only they had been up to something of substance.
The premise of the work was viable and interesting– to create a nativity work not necessarily located in December nor even in the Holy Land but perhaps in the here and now, in California even. With all the ingredients that were assembled however, the concept was overwhelmed and undone. On a large movie screen was projected a continuous film cutting back and forth between (California) desert (dancers in the barren wilds), beach, and homely urban locations, laundry rooms, freeways, and cityscapes. The three dancers in the film danced onstage in person, and the three solo singers, often taking the roles of the principals in the Nativity drama, and also the ensemble of countertenors, sort of danced, struck dramatic poses and frequently did a "lovely hula hands" routine.
Meanwhile, just beneath the movie, on a smaller screen, the Supertitles unrolled with the texts that consumed 13 pages (26 columns) in the program. This was a concatenation of selections from the familiar New Testament accounts, Matthew and Luke (the Magnificat which went by with an almost cursory dispatch), from Haggai (Old Testament), from the New Testament Apocrypha (unauthorized "gospel" narratives by James and Matthias), and poems by the eminent Mexican woman poet Rosario Castellanos (1925-1974), Gabriela Mistral (Chilean), Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (Mexican nun of the 17th century), Rubén Dario (Nicaraguan), and Vincente Huidobro (Chilean).
All that, going by at multiple levels, was more than could be appreciated save in a most general sense of theme. Savoring the evocative and eloquent poems properly was out of the question, and significantly because their musical settings were neither sensitive nor differentiating. Supporting the melodious vocal lines were Adams' characteristic subcutaneous layers of orchestral texture, chugging away in eccentric rhythm, without touching on anything touching. There's a lot of industry there. Ten minutes into this two and half hour discourse, two ideas began forming: first, that Adams' musical style has run out its skein. It's not going anywhere. Second, as Adams and Sellars had done in their immediately previous collaboration, the unfortunate opera, I was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky, they sought to include as much as possible – all the hot-button socio-political issues, in the case of that opera's sophomoric libretto, and for El Niño, a sweeping variety of nativity legend interpretations subsumed in a contemporary vision. But nothing really moved the spirit. Granted, some people doubtless responded to Sellars' naive, drawn-out "home movie" sequences of the young Madonna, a Latina girl with a stud under her lower lip, together with her young Latino Joseph, fleeing from Herod on the freeways in a late model compact sedan, hanging out around a beach bonfire with their newborn Jesus child, joined by two young cops as guardian angels and by the magi from the barrios, two heavy-set matrons and a scruffy-looking, blankly staring young man. The values lay in the great commitment and skill of the musical performers, Kent Nagano's keen command, the precise response of orchestra and chorus, beautiful and heart-felt singing by Hunt, Upshaw and White, and the remarkable purity and integrity of the three countertenors from "Theater of Voices," Daniel Bubeck, Brian Cummings, Steven Rickards. A composer could hardly have a more deeply invested performance. (Robert P. Commanday, the editor of San Francisco Classical Voice, was the music critic of The San Francisco Chronicle, 1965-93, and before that a conductor and lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley.) ©2001 Robert P. Commanday, all rights reserved |
