American Opera Week at the Barbican moves from the totally ridiculous to the nearly sublime. El Nino, John Adams's contemplation of the Nativity story, which receives its first British performances nearly two-and-a-half years after it was introduced at the Chtelet in Paris, may not be an opera as we know it. It is no more an opera, say, than Berlioz's L'Enfance du Christ. But, coming after the musical and dramatic inanities of André Previn's A Streetcar Named Desire, it is wonderful to return to a musical world that is so sure-footed and intelligently wrought, and in which every gesture has power and purpose.
The stage layout - the singers on a raised platform behind the orchestra - which was such a disadvantage in the Previn, works well here. Adams conducts the BBC Symphony Orchestra, and his performance not only has an urgency, a sense of inner tension and of overall shape that were missing from the Chtelet premiere, but relishes the smaller details, too: the sweet-sour tracery that the sampling keyboards add to some of the more reflective passages, the way in which the percussion is used to destabilise the regular metre, the myriad devices through which Adams adds a sense of danger to to the numbers describing Herod's rage and the flight into Egypt.
In its bundle of texts - extracts from the Old and New Testaments, as well as from the Gnostic gospels, and settings of present-day Hispanic poets - El Nino describes the events of the Christmas story and offers a commentary. It never attempts to portray them, but with its moments of great tenderness and sometimes frightening power it spans an emotional range as great as any operatic treatment.
Two of the singers from the premiere, the touching Dawn Upshaw and formidably powerful Willard White, repeat their roles here, while the gently eloquent mezzo Kirsti Harms is new. With the trio of countertenors from the Theatre of Voices, London Voices and the Adopt the Barbican Youth Choir, it is a cogent team. What has not improved since the premiere is the relevance of Peter Sellars's staging. Thankfully it is not too elaborate: a film that reruns the story of the Nativity in a west coast setting, with Mary and Joseph as a Hispanic couple moodily wandering the streets of south LA, is projected behind the singers, who run through the usual repertoire of Sellars's hand gestures and expressive semaphore, and are sometimes helped out by a pair of dancers. Even so, it is distracting and unnecessary. Adams's score has more than enough to keep even the most impatient listener engaged.
· Ends tonight. Box office: 020-7638 8891.
