JOHN ADAMS CONDUCTS EL NIÑO

FRI MAY 20, 7:30 pm | Music Hall

JOHN ADAMS, conductor LAUREN SNOUFFER, soprano JOSEFINA MALDONADO, mezzo-soprano ELLIOT MADORE, baritone DANIEL BUBECK, countertenor BRIAN CUMMINGS, countertenor NATHAN MEDLEY, countertenor MAY FESTIVAL CHORUS Robert Porco, director

The May Festival Chorus is endowed by the Betsy & Alex C. Young Chair MAY FESTIVAL YOUTH CHORUS, Matthew Swanson, director CINCINNATI SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA, Louis Langrée, Music Director

JOHN ADAMS El Niño, A Nativity Oratorio for Chorus and Orchestra

(b. 1947) PART I I Sing of a Maiden Now She Was Sixteen Years Old Hail Mary, Gracious! Joseph’s Dream La anunciación Shake the Heavens For with God No Thing Shall Be Impossible Se habla de Gabriel The Babe Leaped in Her Womb The Christmas Star Magnifi cat

INTERMISSION

PART II

Pues mi dios ha nacido And He Slew All the Children When Herod Heard Memorial de Tlatelolco Woe Unto Them that Call Evil Good In the Day of the Great Slaughter And the Star Went Before Them Pues está tritando The Three Kings Jesus and the Dragons And When They Were Departed A Palm Tree Dawn Air

Tonight’s concert will end at approximately 9:45 pm. By arrangement with Hendon Music, Inc., a Boosey & Hawkes company, publisher and copyright owner.

Tonight’s concert is sponsored by The Wohlgemuth Herschede Foundation. The 2022 May Festival is presented by Fort Washington Investment Advisors. The 2022 May Festival is sponsored by Chavez Properties. The appearance of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra is generously supported by the Louise Dieterle Nippert Musical Arts Fund of the Greenacres Foundation. The appearance of Lauren Snouffer is made possible in part by a generous endowment gift from Mary and Joe Stern. The appearance of Josefina Maldonado is made possible in part by a generous endowment gift from Mr. and Mrs. S. Charles Straus. The appearance of Elliot Madore in this evening’s performance is made possible in part by generous endowment gift from Dr. Thomas Lesher. The appearances of Daniel Bubeck, Brian Cummings and Nathan Medley in this evening’s performance are made possible in part by generous support from the Cincinnati International Wine Festival. Steinway Pianos, courtesy of Willis Music, is the official piano of the May Festival. This concert will be broadcast on 90.9 WGUC on October 2, 2022 at 8 pm. The use of photographic and recording devices at these concerts is prohibited.

by Dr. Richard E. Rodda

© 2022 May Festival JOHN ADAMS

El Niño

Born: February 15, 1947 in Worcester, Massachusetts Work Composed: 1999–2000 as a co-commission from the Châtelet Theater in Paris, San Francisco Symphony, Lincoln Center in New York, Barbican Center in London, and Deutsches Symphonie in Berlin Premiere: December 15, 2000 at the Châtelet Theater in Paris, with soloists Dawn Upshaw, Lorraine Hunt-Lieberson and Willard White, Theatre of Voices (countertenors: Daniel Bubeck, Brian Cummings and Steven Rickards), London Voices, La Maîtresse de Paris and Deutsches Symphonie Orchester, conducted by Kent Nagano Instrumentation: soprano, mezzo-soprano, baritone, male ensemble (3 countertenors), mixed chorus, children’s choir, 2 flutes (incl. 2 piccolos), 2 oboes (incl. 2 English horns), 2 clarinets (incl. bass clarinet), 2 bassoons (incl. contrabassoon), 3 horns, 3 trombones, almglocken, chimes, claves, cowbell, crotale, glockenspiel, gong, guiro, maracas, tamtam, temple blocks, temple bowl, triangles, harp, celeste, piano, sampler, 2 guitars, strings May Festival Notable Performances: This is the first May Festival performance of the work. Duration: approx. 111 minutes “I love Messiah,” declared John Adams. “I always wanted to write my own Messiah. I loved Handel’s music but not only that, the story itself. I have a somewhat checkered religious background and I wasn’t someone who studied the Bible, but I certainly knew the Nativity and Passion stories. When I was asked to celebrate the millennium, the year 2000 seemed like an appropriate date to write a Messiah-type piece. I went to my long-term friend, director Peter Sellars, and said, ‘Let’s put together a libretto about the roughness and the toughness and the difficulty of life,’ and El Niño came into being.”

Though Messiah (especially the Hallelujah Chorus) is inextricably associated with Christmas, its text, drawn, unusually for Handel’s oratorios, entirely from scripture, concerns three fundamental events in the Christian liturgical year—The Advent of the Messiah, The Passion of Christ, and His Resurrection. Adams’ choice to write specifically a “Nativity Oratorio” arose not from just his love of Handel, but also from the profound experience of the miracle of own his daughter’s birth in 1984. So in addition to its biblical associations, El Niño was also motivated by what Adams termed “the story of birth—not just the birth of Jesus, but the archetypical experience of a woman giving birth.” (“El Niño” in the context of this work refers specifically to the Christ Child, but Adams and Sellars were both keenly aware, even in the year 2000, that the phrase “El Niño” also refers to the phenomenon of Pacific Ocean warming that has had increasingly disruptive effects on climate around the world.)

The one movement that stands apart from the Christmas story is Memorial for Tlatelolco, set to a poem by Rosario Castellanos, which Adams and Sellars used to draw a modern parallel to Herod’s massacre. Tlatelolco is a neighborhood of Mexico City that was the site of a protest on October 2, 1968 by thousands of Mexican students against repressive policies of the Mexican government. Though the demonstrators were peaceful and unarmed, they were surrounded by armored vehicles, jeeps and 5,000 soldiers. Shots, probably from the government forces, rang out, chaos ensued, and as many as 400 demonstrators were killed; 1,345 were arrested. Castellanos captured the essence of the tragedy not just in the angry, stupefied lines that comprise most of her poem, but, perhaps most poignantly, in its mundane references: Dawn broke on the plaza cleanly swept;/the newspapers spoke of the weather as their main story./And on the television, on the radio,/and in the cinema there was no change of program,/no interrupting news bulletin nor even/a minute of silence…. I remember. We remember. The text for El Niño will be published in a program supplement that will be available at the entrances to the auditorium on May 20.

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2022 YOUTH CHORUS AWARD WINNERS

John Hauck Foundation Scholarship

The May Festival Youth Chorus is pleased to award the John Hauck Foundation Scholarship to ANNA VARISCO and ABIGAIL GUINIGUNDO. The scholarship annually supports graduating Youth Chorus members who will pursue university studies in music or a related arts field.

James Bagwell Award

The Youth Chorus is pleased to honor CALIA BURDETTE with the James Bagwell Award. Named for Dr. James Bagwell, conductor of the Youth Chorus 1997–2018, the award recognizes exemplary commitment to the Youth Chorus, intellectual curiosity and musical potential.