The European premiere of John Adams' latest large-scale choral work is the centrepiece of Gustavo Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic's Barbican residency. First performed in Los Angeles in May last year and co-commissioned by the Barbican, The Gospel According to the Other Mary is a "passion oratorio", consciously designed by Adams and his librettist/director Peter Sellars as a companion piece to El Niño, their nativity oratorio which premiered in 2000. Like that work (and, arguably, Adams' operas The Death of Klinghoffer and Doctor Atomic too), The Other Mary hovers somewhere between opera and concert work, and can be performed either fully staged or in a concert hall; here Sellars staged it in the main Barbican hall.
Like El Niño too, the text is a patchwork of extracts – from both old and new testaments, Hildegard of Bingen, and a variety of 20th-century writers, ranging from Primo Levi to June Jordan. The Other Mary is, Sellars has said, an attempt to "set the passion story in the eternal present, in the tradition of sacred art", so the narrative constantly merges the biblical past and the world today. The story unfolds from the point of view of Mary Magdalene, her sister Martha and brother Lazarus, who seem to commute between the two time frames, and so create parallels between the story of Christ's crucifixion and resurrection, and real 20th- and 21st-century events such as Carlos Chavez's campaign for farm workers' rights in Calfornia and the revolutions of the Arab spring.
It's ambitious, frequently tendentious and, at two and quarter hours, perhaps too long. Sellars' staging, mostly on a platform in front of the orchestra, with the chorus, principal singers and dancers wearing a mix of work clothes and flowery trousers and t-shirts, seems desperately earnest and contrived. But what saves the whole project from collapsing into sanctimonious attitudinising is Adams' remarkable score, which contains some of his finest music for many years. For whatever reason, the subject matter seems to have unlocked a whole new expression range in his writing; there's a sinewy angularity to his melodic lines, a crisp astringency to his harmonies, that have only been hinted at before, while his ear for sonority, with a cimbalom adding an extra tang to the textures this time, is as sure as ever.
Bach's passions are inevitably one model for what Adams and Sellars have done; Leonard Bernstein's Mass is perhaps another less obvious one. The narrative function of the passion evangelist is taken over by three countertenors (Daniel Bubeck, Brian Cummings and Nathan Medley here), either singing solo or as a raptly entwined trio; Mary is a mezzo (Kelley O'Connor), Martha a contralto (Tamara Mumford) and Lazarus a tenor (Russell Thomas). It's the tenor who has the nearest thing to a setpiece number in the whole work, near the end of the first act, when he sings of the Passover ritual, in a way that irresistibly recalls the similar catharsis of the setting of Donne's Batter My Heart at a similar moment in the scheme of Doctor Atomic.
If the urgent choral writing seems to derive directly from the turba choruses in the Bach passions, Adams injects them with an jagged, irresistible energy of his own, right from the opening moments of the work. They were superbly delivered by the Los Angeles Master Chorale, but then everything about the performance under Dudamel was vivid and immaculate; musically it was a remarkable occasion.
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