John Adams' other Gospel of Mary @HollandFestival: masterpiece just too long

Holland Festival

Mary is arrested at a demonstration and thrown into a cell next to a heroin addict, while her sister Martha has just started a shelter for the homeless. And Lazarus, yes, Jesus brings him back to life here too, with downright breathtaking sounds. And we are not even halfway through.

The first part of John Adams' The gospel according to the other Mary takes up over seventy minutes and, although nowhere tedious, could have been shorter. For however cleverly Peter Sellars' collage libretto with Biblical texts and fragments by Primo Levi and others is put together, it is mainly the music that impresses. Indeed: Adams has not sounded so fresh, so urgent, in years.

There are very few contemporary composers where you recognise the creator within ten seconds, and John Adams manages to do it again. The minimalist undertone akin to Reich and Glass is still present in the repeating patterns (with a sudden funky bass run!), but Adams certainly writes extremely lyrical music for the strings, writes very small and very large, gives the singers beautiful melodic lines and plays the symphony orchestra as if it were an ensemble in the hands of Louis Andriessen. And so we also hear piano and bass guitar, lots of percussion and a notable role for the cimbalom.

In the build-up, not only are Adams' atomic war drama Doctor Atomic recognisable, again with a 'Batter my heart'-like aria for the tenor ('Tell me: how is this night different'), but also early works like Harmonielehre and his Schoenberg-influenced chamber symphony. His use of the chorus, prominent at the beginning and end of both the first and second movements, recalls his earlier oratorio El Niño, but also the opera The death of Klinghoffer and, above all, Bach.

That Bach was the model for this passion is abundantly clear, but Adams and Sellars are very ambitious and go a step further with the goal: "the passion story in the eternal present, in the tradition of sacred art".

And they succeed.

Adams renders the role of the evangelist through three countertenors, again creating a fine reference to Bach and performance practice. Bach had a choir consisting of only a few singers, while in many passion performances of the twentieth century that choir swells to Wagnerian proportions. Well, the choir here also has Wagnerian proportions, but Adams not only splits it into groups, but also sets it against the smallest imaginable choir: that of three evangelists.

Conductor Markus Stenz leads the Radio Philharmonic, the Groot Omroepkoor and the soloists razor-sharp through this immense work, and at the end holds the spell for as long as possible by accepting the thunderous final applause only after seconds of total silence.

Too bad that the though present Sellars, who recently performed Bach's in Berlin Matthew Passion provided a minimalist staging, did not find the time for semi-scenic performance as in Los Angeles and London, because this modern passion deserves it. Slightly shortened, if possible staged, but then definitely: masterpiece.