The Gospel According to the Other Mary review – the Bible to Skid Row

English National Opera has two productions by Peter Sellars in its current season. His version of Purcell’s The Indian Queen, first seen in Perm last year, arrives at the Coliseum in February, but up first is John Adams’s passion oratorio, The Gospel According to the Other Mary, presented in what is billed as the work’s world stage premiere.

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It helps that the ENO performance is so impressive. It’s superbly conducted by Joana Carneiro, who gets fabulously intense, committed playing and singing from the ENO orchestra and chorus, while the three principal soloists are all, in their different ways, remarkable. Patricia Bardon makes Mary the work’s emotional core, always poised, always quietly, devastatingly eloquent. The contralto Meredith Arwady as her sister Martha is more direct and confrontational, while the tenor Russell Thomas makes the most of Lazarus’s passover aria, whose touching melody would not seem out of place in a high-class Broadway musical.

The Guardian, United Kingdom.