Since their first collaboration on the opera Nixon in China, composer John Adams and director Peter Sellars have not shied away from difficult subjects, and there were high hopes for this European premiere of their latest project, The Gospel According to the Other Mary. Like other works they’ve produced, it’s not quite opera, not quite oratorio. Sellars provided the text, mixing New Testament excerpts about Mary Magdalene’s life with abstract, often obscure musings from sundry sources, Hildegard of Bingen to Primo Levi.
In typical Sellars style, the story shuttles between biblical episodes and a parallel present, in which Mary is a political activist. Jesus does not appear; his life and death is more narrated (by three falsetto Narrators) than presented “live”. It would work without staging; unfortunately Sellars provided one anyway, with Eighties disco calisthenics for three dancers and a combination of semaphore and bookies’ tic-tac for the singers.
Adams’s treatment of the dense scenario consists mostly of undulating recitatives over an intricately woven orchestration studded with glittering details. The vocal lines straddle opera and musical theatre, with odd phrases repeated to show this is no mere sing-song setting. In moments of high intensity, the singers delivered, Russell Thomas’s Lazarus singing as if to raise the dead. As Mary and Martha, Kelley O’Connor and Tamara Mumford were hardly less committed.
This was the centrepiece of the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Barbican residency, and Gustavo Dudamel conducted with assurance. Although his players and chorus responded with blazing enthusiasm, Adams’s Gospel failed to convert this listener. Others disagreed with noisy enthusiasm.
