Described as a "nativity oratorio",[1] it retells the Christmas story, with the first half focusing on Mary's thoughts before the birth in the stable in Bethlehem, and the second half covering the aftermath of the birth, Herod's slaughter of the Holy Innocents, and the early life of Jesus.
A shortened version of the work, removing two of the three countertenors and the chorus as well as much of the orchestra, was suggested by soprano Julia Bullock in 2018 for a performance at The Cloisters of the Metropolitan Museum of Art under the title El Niño: Nativity Reconsidered.[6][7]
Performance history
The American premiere took place on January 11, 2001 at Davies Hall, San Francisco, with Kent Nagano conducting the San Francisco Symphony and San Francisco Symphony Chorus, the Piedmont Children's Choir, and with the same soloists as at the Paris premiere.[2][8]
It received its collegiate premiere as a semi-staged oratorio on November 6, 2002, at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, conducted by Carmen Helena Téllez, with student soloists Su-Hyoun Kim, Hannah Penn and Robert Samels, but also including the professional countertenors of the premiere, Dan Bubeck, Brian Cummings and Steve Rickards, members of Theater of Voices and alumni of the School. The artistic director of Theater of Voices, Paul Hillier was at the time a faculty member of the School. [9]
In May 2003 the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Chorus performed the work under the direction of Robert Spano and the following month opened the 67th Ravinia Festival with a critically acclaimed performance of the oratorio.[11][12]
A new and highly praised production, using puppets instead of dancers and film, was given at Spoleto Festival USA in May 2014, directed by John La Bouchardière and featured the Westminster Choir, directed by Joe Miller.[13]
El Niño is approximately two hours long, comprises two parts, and is subdivided further into thirteen sub-sections as follows:
Part 1
Part 2
I Sing of a Maiden
Hail, Mary, Gracious!
La anunciación
For with God no thing shall be impossible
The babe leaped in her womb
Magnificat
Now she was sixteen years old
Joseph's dream
Shake the heavens
Se habla de Gabriel
The Christmas Star
Pues mi dios ha nacido
When Herod heard
Woe unto them that call evil good
And the star went before them
The Three Kings
And when they were departed
Dawn air
And he slew all the children
Memorial de Tlatelolco
In the day of the great slaughter
Pues está tiritando
Jesus and the dragons
A palm tree
Reception
Arnold Whittall has stated that the stylistic pluralism and chronological diversity of sources found in El Niño facilitates the layering of “archaic” and modern elements, allowing the Biblical to be “counterpointed by allusions to modern, South American society."[15] In reply, Richard Taruskin decried the multicultural and chronological eclecticism of the work as being symptomatic of late-twentieth century elitism and consumerism.[16]
Susan McClary has identified how the work’s premodern elements further Peter Sellars’s key thematic concerns, demonstrating that such references have a function beyond chronological eclecticism.[17] Izaak Wesson describes El Niño as an example of medievalism in contemporary opera, arguing that medievalism has played a significant role in the construction of the work's feminist, spiritual, and multicultural themes in Adams's score, and all extant stagings.[18]
Recordings
2000: DVD video: Sellars' Paris production of El Niño with Dawn Upshaw, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, Willard White; conductor: Kent Nagano. Arthaus Musik, Cat #101669[19]
2001: 2-CD recording of original cast from the Théâtre du Châtelet, Paris. Nonesuch Records, Cat #79634-2[20]
