Feast of the Passover, from The Gospel According to the Other Mary

Program notes

About the Work

The Gospel According to the Other Mary is a Passion for our own time: an opera-oratorio in two acts that Adams wrote with the director Peter Sellars, his partner on Nixon in China and on the nativity oratorio El Niño. The Los Angeles Philharmonic gave the first performance under Gustavo Dudamel at Walt Disney Concert Hall on 31 May 2012, and a staged version followed there in March 2013.

It tells the story of the last weeks of Jesus’s life from the side of people the Gospels keep in the background: Mary of Bethany, her sister Martha and their brother Lazarus. Jesus never appears. His words reach us through the other characters, the chorus and a trio of countertenors who act as narrators, much as the Evangelist does in a Bach Passion. Sellars assembled the libretto from the Old and New Testaments and from much later writers, among them Hildegard of Bingen, Dorothy Day, Louise Erdrich, Rosario Castellanos, June Jordan, Rubén Darío and Primo Levi. The action slips between biblical time and the present, where Mary and Martha care for homeless women and take part in political protest.

The later part of the first act tells of the death and raising of Lazarus, and the act closes with a Passover scene. Tonight’s extract comes from that ending. At its centre is Lazarus’s setting of ‘Passover’, a poem by Primo Levi, the Italian writer and chemist who survived the Holocaust. The poem takes up the question traditionally asked at the Passover table: ‘Tell me: how is this night different from all other nights?’ Critics have often picked out this aria as a high point of the whole score.

The LSO’s London listing gives the extract the title ‘Feast of the Passover’ and names no singer. The halls in Paris and Luxembourg, where the orchestra repeats this programme later in January, both list the tenor Russell Thomas, who sang Lazarus at the 2012 premiere; the Luxembourg listing calls the extract by the poem’s first line. Rattle knows the complete work well. He conducted it with the Berliner Philharmoniker in a performance filmed in 2017, and it is part of that orchestra’s set of Adams recordings.

What to Listen For

If a tenor is on the platform, as the Paris and Luxembourg listings suggest, the extract is in effect a single aria with orchestra. Listen first to the words. Levi’s poem is a plain question that keeps being asked, and the vocal line is broad and songful where much of the oratorio’s writing for voices is angular. A reviewer of the 2014 London staging heard in it ‘an almost Broadway-esque breadth and lyricism’. Another, in San Francisco, called it the vocal highlight of the evening and described the poem as one of forgiveness, hope and humanity.

Then listen to how the orchestra answers. The London review describes the end of the scene as a grating orchestral postlude, with shrieking brass chords cutting through throbbing strings. After the warmth of the aria it points to where the story goes next, in the second act, which tells the Passion itself.