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    Review: John Adams’s ‘El Niño’ Arrives at the Met in Lush Glory

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    The opera-oratorio, an alternate Nativity story, featured a flurry of Met debuts, including the director Lileana Blain-Cruz and the conductor Marin Alsop.On Tuesday night, the Metropolitan Opera continued to play a bit of catch-up with the American composer John Adams.As a Minimalist of striking imagination and moral probity, Adams has developed a distinct musical style and point of view that have earned him a firm place in the pantheon of American art music over the past 40 years or so. His operas, though, didn’t make it to the Met stage until 2008, when “Doctor Atomic” had its East Coast premiere. “Nixon in China” followed in 2011 and “The Death of Klinghoffer” in 2014, decades after they were written. These are Adams’s so-called CNN operas, with subject matter ripped from headlines and history books. But “El Niño,” a hybrid opera-oratorio from 2000 that had its Met premiere on Tuesday, is a different animal.Created with the librettist and director Peter Sellars, a frequent collaborator, “El Niño” is an alternative Nativity story, drawing its Spanish, Latin and English texts from the Apocrypha, 20th-century Mexican and South American poetry, a medieval mystery play and, of course, the New Testament. The gospels of James and Pseudo-Matthew, which didn’t make it into the codified Bible, provide some of the most characterful scenes, as when Joseph comes home to find Mary six months pregnant and exclaims irately, “Who did this evil thing in my house and defiled her?”The air of triumph as the curtain came down on Tuesday night owed as much to the piece as to the director Lileana Blain-Cruz’s vibrant and infectiously exultant production. It was almost as inspiring to see as it was to hear Adams’s marvelous work on the Met’s stage.It was an evening of firsts. The trailblazing conductor Marin Alsop made her long overdue Met debut to much applause. The singers Julia Bullock and Davóne Tines and most of the creative team also made their first appearances.Taking a cue from the piece’s Latin flavor, Blain-Cruz trades the Middle Eastern climate of standard biblical depictions for a lushly tropical realm. The set designer Adam Rigg’s storybook framework, with rolling hills and broad-leaved plants that look like cardboard cutouts, achieves grandeur without aloofness. Montana Levi Blanco’s moss-green costumes for the chorus amplify the sense of a thriving natural world, but shocks of hot pink and aquatic blue, particularly in Yi Zhao’s hallucinogenic lighting design for “Shake the Heavens,” recall the iridescent striations of a Mexican serape. The puppet designer James Ortiz’s contributions reach a captivating zenith in the “Christmas Star” finale of Part 1.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Review: The Philharmonic Feasts on ‘The Planets’

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      Under Dima Slobodeniouk, the orchestra played works by Holst and Ligeti and, for the first time, Julia Perry’s somber “Stabat Mater.”Holst’s “The Planets” is one of the Thanksgiving feasts of classical music. It seduces with variety of color and texture — just as tangy cranberry compote refreshes after buttery mashed potatoes — but tends to leave you overstuffed.I’ve never heard it when it wasn’t at least a little too much. But, played with vigor by the New York Philharmonic under Dima Slobodeniouk on Wednesday evening at David Geffen Hall, it didn’t have me moaning with overindulgence, as some “Planets” performances do. It felt like an ideal way to ring in a holiday that’s all about bounty.There was punchiness in “Mars” and genuine playfulness in “Mercury,” and Slobodeniouk was agile in guiding the orchestra through the hairpin transitions of “Jupiter.” That section’s noble hymn theme was less strings-heavy than usual, flowing with ease.That Ligeti’s “Atmosphères” is, like “The Planets,” indelibly associated with the extraterrestrial is due less to its title than to its inclusion (without its composer’s permission) in the soundtrack of “2001: A Space Odyssey.”Written in 1961, not quite half a century after Holst’s tone poem, the sumptuously eerie “Atmosphères” on Wednesday felt a bit like the son or grandson of “The Planets.” Ligeti’s queasily unsettled sound world seemed a direct descendant of the stunned stillness at the start of “Saturn,” the uneasy simmering after the march drops out in “Uranus” and the gaseous, hovering mystery of “Neptune.” Neither of these works was played with super-polish at Geffen, but under Slobodeniouk both had vibrant drama.Those tried and true “Planets” aside, this wasn’t a concert of chestnuts. The orchestra revived “Atmosphères” to cap its commemorations this fall of Ligeti’s centennial; it hasn’t presented the piece (except as it’s excerpted in the “2001” score) since 1978. And it is performing Julia Perry’s 1951 “Stabat Mater” this week for the first time ever.Perry’s brief “Study for Orchestra” was, in 1965, the first music by a Black woman to be played on a Philharmonic subscription program. It was brought back last year, but the “Stabat Mater,” scored for strings and a vocalist, is a far more powerful work. Heated yet subtle and restrained, the piece’s 10 sections on a Latin text, lasting about 20 minutes in all, chart an intimate drama whose moments of grandeur are all the more effective given the overall modesty.In the short prelude, light yet pungent pizzicato plucks — amid brooding low strings and an elegiac solo violin — movingly evoke Jesus’s mother’s tears without feeling too obvious. Throughout, Perry gives both voice and orchestra an appealing combination of Neo-Baroque angularity and post-Romantic warmth. The quivering, high-pitched flames of “the fire of love” near the end are reminders that this piece and “Atmosphères” date from the same era.The mezzo-soprano J’Nai Bridges sang with oracular authority in the somber vocal lines, rising to flashes of intensity. There were passages in which a more encompassing, contralto-style richness in the low register would have filled out this music. But Bridges’s focused tone was just right for Perry’s poignant austerity.The violinist Sheryl Staples, in the concertmaster chair, played with sweetness and eloquence in both the “Stabat Mater” and Holst’s “Venus.” That section of “The Planets” also featured a beautifully mellow flute solo by Alison Fierst, leading into rhapsodic lines from the orchestra’s longtime principal cello, Carter Brey.Oh, and for at least one night, the “fireflies” — the lights over the Geffen stage that do a flickering up-and-down dance before concerts, in corny imitation of the chandeliers that rise before curtain at the Metropolitan Opera next door — were stilled.Might they stay that way forevermore? That would be something to be thankful for.New York PhilharmonicThis program repeats through Saturday at David Geffen Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More

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      Review: J’Nai Bridges Brings Her Splendid Sound to an Eclectic Recital

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      The mezzo-soprano J’Nai Bridges performed at the 92nd Street Y, joined by the pianist Mark Markham and the Catalyst Quartet.Some singers simply have a voice built for the stage — an instrument whose particular blend of color, vibrancy and volume is best heard live. The mezzo-soprano J’Nai Bridges is one of them.When she made her debut at the Metropolitan Opera, as Nefertiti in the company premiere of Philip Glass’s “Akhnaten” in 2019, she loosed a luscious voice as opulent and seamless as the regal fabric of her costumes.Then, when the pandemic closed arts venues worldwide the following year, Bridges participated in the ad hoc streaming industry. Recorded audio, though, can flatten or harden some voices, and a rich sound like Bridges’s comes to life in a resonant auditorium.On Thursday, she gave a recital at the 92nd Street Y, with the pianist Mark Markham and the Catalyst Quartet. Her program, varied yet concise, drew from the work of Black and Hispanic composers — an eclectic repertoire that could not easily accommodate her splendid sound.She opened with a galvanizing spiritual, “Every Time I Feel the Spirit,” which set an affirming tone. The opening phrases emerged from a smoky contralto register, and her middle voice, warm and velvety, pealed forth with immediacy. Her switch into an operatic style for her high notes felt prim, an imperfect melding of different vocal techniques. She followed with Carlos Simon’s setting of the Langston Hughes poem “Prayer”; in a performance seething with irony yet propelled by earnestness, she urged the audience to embrace “the sick, the depraved, the desperate, the tired,” whom she gathered up herself with a lavish, generous tone.In the middle part of her program, Bridges sang Jimmy López Bellido’s “Airs for Mother,” a world premiere for voice and string quartet; an aria from López Bellido’s opera “Bel Canto,” which she has performed onstage in Chicago; and Manuel de Falla’s “Seven Popular Spanish Songs,” among the most well-known and beloved Spanish-language art songs.Her voice bursting with color but sometimes flagging in the middle or end of phrases, Bridges overwhelmed the dimensions of “Airs for Mother” and the Falla songs but also didn’t consistently commit to her choices.López Bellido wrote the text as well as the music of “Airs for Mother,” tracing a simple, impactful narrative from a child’s awe at her life to an adult’s devastation at her loss. Even though the piece felt quasi-operatic, with recitative, climactic high notes, dramatic flourishes and string tremolos, Bridges overwhelmed the quartet’s slender, glimmering sound with her plush, powerful singing.Bridges performed the López and Falla selections with a music stand, making her seem earthbound. And Markham, a warm collaborator at the piano, was more supportive than secure in his parts.But the evening snapped into focus with John Carter’s “Cantata,” a five-part suite that honors the tradition of spirituals by elaborating on several as contemporary art songs. Originally written for the majestic soprano Leontyne Price, it firmly occupies a classical idiom, with a bravura ending so obviously crafted for her shimmery upper register that it sounds like a plaster cast of her voice.Bridges, finding in “Cantata” a piece that suits her, gave an electrifying performance. There were no gear shifts in technique, and her voice sounded taut with intention. Flinging her arms wide, she took flight.J’Nai BridgesPerformed on Thursday at the 92nd Street Y, Manhattan. More