The Gospel According to the Other Mary

Wow! What was that? John Adams’s 2012 oratorio, staged by director Peter Sellars for ENO, offers a brilliantly colourful and energetic score. It is accompanied by four dancers and a declamatory chorus, and to reflect the continual switch between New Testament events (the raising of Lazarus and Jesus’s resurrection) and modern times (workers’ protests and their suppression), George Tsypin’s set consists of nothing beyond razor-wired prison fences inside a large tent.

The Other Mary – Magdalene, if you’re wondering – is sung by mezzo Patricia Bardon. She exists both in the time of Jesus and in the present, running a shelter for homeless women with her sister Martha, sung by contralto Meredith Arwady. It is an unusual singing combination; add to that three slickly harmonising countertenors as the Seraphim and the vocal texture is solidly in the middle range. The only high notes come from superb dramatic tenor Russell Thomas, who plays the sisters’ brother Lazarus.

So does this former oratorio benefit from a theatrical staging? Not really. Sellars – long-time associate of Adams – wrote the libretto himself, and it often looks like the stage action has been contrived merely to accommodate its curious meditative structure. Slivers of recognisable biblical text and bleeding chunks of decontextualised poetry reduce much of it to being, at best, esoteric, at worst, gibberish. The visual star is a mesmeric dancer called Banks (as the Angel Gabriel) who jerks and writhes his way through the two hours of this opera.

But close your eyes and what a score! John Adams is surely the foremost American composer working today. Surging chords, brass fanfares and woodwind figures ripple through the rich orchestral textures, occasionally slowing, such as to depict the desolate landscape of Golgotha, with a cimbalom throughout, underpinning the Middle Eastern connection. It is wonderful music, worth hearing the terrific ENO orchestra play in its own right, here conducted with confidence and gusto by Portuguese maestro Joana Carneiro.