El Niño: Nativity Reconsidered

Adelaide Festival. Adelaide Town Hall. 12 Mar 2026

 

El Niño: Nativity Reconsidered is a condensed version of El Niño, the Christmas oratorio–cum–chamber opera by John Adams with a libretto compiled by Peter Sellars. Sellars’ text draws on a wide range of sources about the birth of Christ, including the New Testament, the Apocryphal Gospels, Latin American poetry and other literary reflections on the Nativity. The composition places particular emphasis on Mary and on the experiences of women surrounding the birth narrative.

 

The original El Niño, premiered in 2000, featured in the 2002 Adelaide Festival, and runs for a little over two hours and calls for large orchestral and choral forces. Tonight’s “reconsidered” version—conceived by the celebrated soprano Julia Bullock following discussion with Adams and Sellars—is approximately forty-five minutes shorter. The reasons for the abridgement are practical as much as artistic. Adams’ full score calls for significant musical resources, making it an expensive undertaking, especially for a single performance in a festival! A shorter version, using smaller forces, is easier to mount and perhaps more approachable for audiences unfamiliar with Adams’ distinctive musical language. For presenters of oratories at Christmas time, a seasonal staple such as Handel’sMessiah is likely a safer option than Adams’ more contemporary consideration of the Nativity.

 

This reviewer counts himself among the admirers of Adams’ music, particularly his operas such as Nixon in China, The Death of Klinghoffer, and Doctor Atomic. Inevitably, the shortened Nativity Reconsidered sacrifices some of the narrative breadth and dramatic pacing of the original, and the storytelling feels less persuasive as a result. Nevertheless, the composition retains much of the emotional power and sonic appeal of Adams’ score, and introduces this remarkable work to a wider audience, which is only a good thing.

 

Adams’ music in El Niño combines minimalist techniques with which he is often associated and a far more opulent, almost late-Romantic orchestral palette. The rhythmic engine that drives much of his music is present here: pulsing figures, repeating patterns, and gently shifting harmonic fields that create a sense of continuous motion. Yet lyricism also pervades the score, and various ‘arias’ include long vocal lines unfolding over shimmering orchestral textures, and the music frequently blooms into radiant harmonic landscapes that seem to hover between contemplation and ecstatic affirmation.

 

The orchestration includes synthesiser and amplified guitar which gives the score a modern ‘feel’, and refined percussion and sweeping string writing add energy and depth. Understanding the architecture of the work—and especially the texts Sellars has chosen—deepens one’s appreciation considerably. Without this context, El Niño can still be enjoyed purely as music: an arresting succession of luminous choral passages, expressive solos, and compelling orchestral interludes. But the libretto repays closer attention. Sellars’ central idea was to retell the Nativity story from a female perspective, shifting the emotional and narrative focus from the traditional patriarchal viewpoint to the experiences of women.

 

To achieve this, Sellars juxtaposes biblical texts with modern poetry that resonates with the same themes. One of his most powerful choices replaces the biblical account of the Slaughter of the Innocents with a poem by the Mexican writer Rosario Castellanos describing the 1968 massacre of student protesters at the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in Mexico City. The event occurred only days before the 1968 Olympic Games, and the poem’s stark imagery transforms the ancient story into a chillingly contemporary reflection on violence against the innocent. In some ways it asserts that the Nativity narrative is timeless and still relevant. Sadly, current events happening elsewhere in our troubled world add weight to this.

 

El Niño: Nativity Reconsidered is scored for a reduced orchestra, four soloists and a small chorus drawn from the ranks of the Adelaide Chamber Singers. The solo quartet comprises Bullock, mezzo-soprano Margaret Plummer, countertenor Austin Haynes and baritone Simon Meadows. All four deliver performances of clarity and commitment, though Bullock and Plummer prove particularly compelling.

 

The Adelaide Symphony Orchestra performs under the assured direction of Christian Reif. Throughout the performance the orchestra provides a finely balanced accompaniment, maintaining Adams’ intricate rhythmic momentum while allowing the vocal lines to breathe. Yet there are moments when the orchestra emerges with thrilling force. The Magnificat is one such point: Reif unleashes the full weight of Adams’ orchestral writing, with pounding repeated chords and surging rhythmic figures that fill the acoustic space of the Adelaide Town Hall with electrifying energy. It is quintessential Adams—propulsive, dramatic, and utterly gripping.

 

The work concludes with a luminous setting of another poem by Castellanos, The Rescue of the World. Here Adams’ music softens into something almost otherworldly, and vocal lines float in time and space. As the final syllables dissolve into silence, the audience emerges from this contemplative sound world and responds with warm and heartfelt applause—even from those who may have approached Adams (and Sellars) with some scepticism.

 

Kym Clayton

 

When: 12 Mar

Where: Adelaide Town Hall

Bookings: Closed

Ed Sheeran

Loop Tour. Adelaide Oval. 5 Mar 2026

 

On a warm late-summer evening, more than 50,000 fans stream into Adelaide Oval for Ed Sheeran’s return to Adelaide, this time with his Loop Tour. The stage design speaks immediately to the scale of the night: a vast curved screen and stage anchor the set, a raised central platform at its centre from which a telescopic bridge extends to a small circular stage in the heart of the stadium. It is a setting built for spectacle, yet its centrepiece remains a single performer with a guitar and a suite of loop pedals.

 

In the intro, Sheeran gestures to a looping rig beside him, explaining the philosophy of the show. “Everything you hear tonight is played live,” he says. “There are no backing tracks.”

Sheeran wastes no time demonstrating that premise. You Need Me, I Don’t Need You explodes out as the opener, its rapid-fire lyrics punctuated by bursts of live scatting while he layers rhythm, percussion, and guitar through the looper. The technique—building a song piece by piece in real time—remains the defining magic trick of Sheeran’s live show. Watching him construct the groove from scratch is a thrill, even for seasoned audiences.

 

Between songs Sheeran grins at the sea of faces and announces that Adelaide marks the seventeenth and final show of the Australia and New Zealand run. “Let’s make it the loudest,” he urges—a challenge the crowd takes seriously all night.

 

Sapphire follows, the stage in a wash of saturated reds and blues on the giant screen behind him. When the chorus hits, fireworks streak into the sky above as tens of thousands of voices shout the word ‘sapphire’ back at the stage. It is a moment of pure pop theatre.

 

The energy surges again with Castle on the Hill, the folk-pop anthem transforming into a gallop. Its driving beat and nostalgic storytelling feel tailor-made for a crowd this size, with fireworks punctuating each chorus like exclamation points.

 

But Sheeran knows when to pivot from bombast to intimacy. By the fourth song, The A Team, the tempo drops and the stadium dims to near darkness as the sun finally sets. One by one, phone torches begin to glow until roughly 50,000 tiny lights shimmer across the stands. In a venue designed for sport and spectacle, the effect is strangely delicate—a moment of quiet solidarity between performer and audience.

 

Sheeran uses the lull to chat. “It’s amazing to see so many young faces in his audience,” he notes. As a child, he tells the crowd, he’d seen Green Day with his father at age ten. It is one of the experiences that first made him dream about playing arenas himself.

 

Shivers is up next, a dance-pop track reconstructed layer by layer through the looper until the beat thumps across the stadium. Then comes Don’t, during which the telescopic bridge extends towards the central platform, Sheeran striding across it to the smaller circular stage surrounded by fans, leading a call-and-response chorus that echoes through the oval.

 

Some of the night’s most powerful moments come when the show slows down. Introducing Eyes Closed, Sheeran speaks of grief and the loss of his friend Jamal Edwards. The song, he explains, was written during a period of mourning. When the chorus arrives, Sheeran steps back from the microphone and lets the audience sing the words themselves—a communal release that hangs in the air long after the final note.

 

The mood lifts when an audience vote (via QR codes) prompts for the next track. The choice is Sing, and it flips the atmosphere into full party mode. Sheeran bounces between loop pedals and guitar, testing the edges of his falsetto while the crowd fills the choruses with elongated whoa-ohs.

 

I’m a Mess follows with thousands clapping the rhythm in sync, before the evening dips again into reflection. Visiting Hours, one of Sheeran’s most poignant songs about loss, is delivered with a visible emotional weight. Once again the torches are aloft, transforming the stadium into a field of flickering lights.

 

Give Me Love builds slowly from gentle guitar to soaring climax. As the chorus swells, jets of flame burst from towers flanking the stage, bathing the performance in heat and light. Sheeran then splits the crowd into two halves, conducting them in a surprisingly tight two-part harmony.

 

By this point the show has reached a point where the scale of the venue threatens to dwarf the solitary performer. The arrival of Irish folk group Beoga—collaborators on Galway Girl—provides a welcome shift. The band’s fiddle, bodhrán, and accordion inject a rush of Celtic energy into the set.

 

Galway Girl erupts into a dancefloor jig, complete with green fireworks overhead. Nancy Mulligan and I Don’t Care kept the tempo high, the additional musicians giving the music a fullness that carries easily across the enormous space. On Old Phone the fiddle stands out, weaving an agile melody that showcases the instrument’s virtuosity.

 

Perhaps the most visually striking moment comes during Camera. As Sheeran sings the line “I don’t need a camera to catch this moment,” he asks the audience to take out their phones and snap a picture with the flash on. In an instant, roughly 52,000 flashes glitter in the dark like a constellation of stars. The effect is equal parts remarkable and moving.

The band’s final number, Celestial, has the entire stadium jumping in rhythm before they depart, leaving Sheeran alone again with his guitar for Photograph. Stripped back to its simplest form, the ballad hushes the crowd into attentive silence.

 

Another extended storytelling interlude follows. At seventeen, Sheeran says, he left his small hometown and moved to London with little more than determination and a guitar. The music industry didn’t immediately welcome him, he shares; he spent years writing songs for others before finding his own voice as an artist.

To illustrate the point, he launches into a medley of hits he has written for other performers: Eastside, originally recorded by Halsey and Khalid; 2002 by Anne-Marie; Cold Water by Major Lazer; and the ubiquitous Love Yourself, made famous by Justin Bieber. It is a reminder that Sheeran’s influence extends far beyond his own catalogue.

 

From there the set rolls into a pair of crowd-pleasing classics. Thinking Out Loud ignites one of the night’s biggest singalongs, while Perfect has the entire stadium swaying together under the lights.

 

The final stretch leans again on Sheeran’s looping prowess. I See Fire builds from a pulsing rhythm tapped onto the guitar body, its layered beat vibrating through the stadium with accompanying imagery from The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug. Symmetry, typically a collaboration with Karan Aujla, emerges here as a solo showcase of looping wizardry, its tribal rhythms marking a stylistic departure from his usual pop-folk comfort zone.

 

Then comes Bloodstream, arguably the night’s most explosive performance. Lasers slice through the darkness while the song’s rhythm expands into a massive electronic pulse. Each chorus is punctuated by bursts of flame from the towers, turning the stage into a furnace of light and sound.

Afterglow brings the pace down again before Sheeran thanks the crowd and slips offstage. The audience response is immediate and deafening as we demand an encore.

 

The encore wastes no time delivering what everyone wants. As the opening chords of Shape of You ring out, the entire stadium leaps to its feet. Azizam follows with a thick looped beat that has the crowd bouncing once more, and by the time Bad Habits arrives the night has fully returned to party mode.

 

For all its highlights, the concert reveals an intriguing tension at the heart of Sheeran’s live concept. His looping technique remains a marvel—a one-man orchestra built in real time—and his storytelling between songs makes him one of pop’s most endearing stage personalities. Yet in a venue as enormous as Adelaide Oval, the intimacy that makes his music so appealing can sometimes feel diluted by sheer scale.

 

When Beoga joined the stage, the music suddenly fills the space with greater ease. Their presence hints at how powerful the show could be with more instrumental support. Alone, Sheeran commands attention through sheer charisma and craft, but a stadium occasionally asks for something bigger than one man and a pedalboard.

 

Still, the night proves why Sheeran continues to connect so deeply with audiences around the world. He performs with a sincerity that doesn’t feel manufactured, and when the crowd sings along—as they did repeatedly throughout this performance—the distance between artist and audience dissolves.

 

As the final notes fade and 52,000 fans file out into the Adelaide night, the verdict is clear. The Loop Tour may be built on technological ingenuity, but its real engine is something far simpler: a songwriter, a guitar, and a crowd willing to sing every word back.

 

Paul Rodda

 

When: 5 Mar

Where: Adelaide Oval

Bookings: Closed

The Tiger Lillies

Adelaide Festival. Serenade From The Sewer. Her Majesty’s Theatre. 5 Mar 2026

 

This really was a beautiful performance from the Tiger Lillies, full of subtlety, of light and shade (more dark than light) and acutely perceptive. It was as though the three performers knew an Adelaide Festival audience wanted nothing more than to relax for a couple of hours and be entertained by klezmer inspired songs of heroin addiction, prostitution, and death.

 

The Tiger Lillies have mellowed since I saw them last, to be expected in the passing of 14 or 15 years. Less snarled savagery (in fact, none) and with their punk antecedents well and truly rubbed into a dull sheen, this was, for a Tiger Lillies fan, a reflective performance, reliant upon the exploration of melody and the tonalities of the music, and in the use of reduced syncopation from the percussion, “quick and slow, that’s the way it goes”.

 

The three have an easy presence on stage even given the inherent menace of contrasting white facepaint and deep black eye sockets. From the left is bassist, theremin and musical saw player Adrian Stout; centre is founding singer and accordion and grand piano player Martyn Jacques; and on the right the newest member (since 2021), drummer and maestro of strange sounds man Budi Butenop (drums, percussion, washboard, rubber squeaky toy etc). It is of course Jacques who is the centre of attention, his singing voice a sharp tenor which focuses the attention upon the lyrics. He plays it fairly straight and there is little to no overt interaction with the audience.

 

The three come on stage and begin with Soho Song, Adrian Stout gestures to the audience as the tempo picks up, then eases. He says nothing but his lanky body working the upright bass conveys plenty. On the far side of the stage Butenop’s face is much more expressive, he becomes a firm crowd favourite playing a minor jester’s role to Jacques lyrical menace. “A junkie always gets the blame,” he intones at one point. A Tiger Lillies gig is a lyrical descent into the cesspit with songs about heroin (Heroin), being a junkie (Junkie), whores (Bar Italia) and the plumbing of vice (Down To Hell). Not for nothing is this touring iteration billed as ‘Serenade From The Sewer’.

 

Highlights? There are many. The way this band has transcended their punk influenced Weimar cabaret roots whilst keeping the crazed-accordion klezmer base to their music is exceptional, and I write this noting that many three piece bands fail on precisely this point, unable to break free of their initial constraints. For me it came to pass with the syncopated rhythmic chug of Stabbed In The Back. All credit to Butenop who leads the 12-bar bustle: “Stabbed in the back by a railroad track…” which then devolves into a lengthy drum solo, a good proportion of which I’m almost certain was a paeon to John Bonham’s seminal Moby Dick.

 

Nothing shows their development more than the final song of the evening, the first to give me a clear indication that they do much more than playact through a portal of Brecht-like societal decay and horror. Birds Sing In Ukraine is a poignant and deliberately low-key delivery of a song, sparse instrumentation which does nothing to detract from the stilted vocal delivery of a song about corpses in the field and dedicated in its final moments to ‘the butcher of Moscow’.

 

“Fuck Putin,” says Jacques, drawing down the curtain on our evening’s entertainment. Adelaide loves the Tiger Lillies and the Tiger Lillies assuredly love Adelaide.

 

Alex Wheaton

 

When: 5 to 6 Mar

Where: Her Majesty’s Theatre

Bookings: Closed

Monteverdi’s Vespers

Adelaide Festival. St Peter’s Cathedral. 3 Mar 2026

 

As part of the Adelaide Festival, French choir and orchestra Pygmalion are presenting three concerts. The first, Bach: Good Night World, was already a striking demonstration of the ensemble’s musical discipline and tonal refinement. Just when it seemed difficult to imagine a performance surpassing it, along came Vespro della Beata Vergine by Claudio Monteverdi (or more simply, Monteverdi’s Vespers).

 

At the conclusion of the concert the usually sedate and solemn cathedral erupted with sustained applause and cheering from a near-capacity audience. The entire hall rose to its feet and continued applauding for nearly ten minutes—a response that was entirely proportionate and appropriate to what had just been heard.

 

Conductor and founder Raphaël Pichon appeared relatively contained in Bach: Good Night World, but in Monteverdi’s Vespers he seemed to release both his and the ensemble’s full expressive potential. The performance unfolded with swelling intensity, and the magnificence of the work becoming almost overwhelming by its closing stages.

 

As is Pygmalion’s custom, the choir moved throughout the performance space. Initially this reviewer wondered whether the movement risked becoming excessive, but it soon became clear that it is carefully conceived. Nothing is arbitrary: the placement of singers appears to be carefully planned to exploit the cathedral’s natural acoustic and to expose different aspects of the score.

 

Many members of the audience found themselves with one or more singers—and occasionally instrumentalists—standing and performing only a few metres away. It was impossible to resist glancing around and observe them at close quarters, often with a kind of childlike fascination. The physical proximity heightened one’s sense of participation in the music-making. The emotional effect was unmistakable, and more than a few audience members could be seen quietly wiping tears from their cheeks.

 

The performance was generous in scope. The complete score was presented, including two additional liturgical elements: the antiphon Sancta Maria, succurre miseris (Holy Mary, help the wretched), sung in response to the psalm Lauda Jerusalem, and Versiculum et responsorium after the Magnificat to conclude the event. The duration approached two hours without interval, yet the performance passed almost in the blink of an eye, as if time was irrelevant.

 

The evening revealed the full range of Pygmalion’s strengths: voices of exceptional clarity that carried effortlessly into every corner of the cathedral; immaculate diction, with choral passages often sounding as though produced by a single voice; and finely judged dynamic shaping, from controlled crescendi and diminuendi to penetrating sforzandi. Ensemble coordination was equally impressive, with voices and instruments aligned in precise rhythmic and expressive detail. Rapid shifts in metre and texture were navigated with ease, supported by disciplined breath control and thoughtful phrasing.

 

Equally striking was the evident attention to acoustical considerations. Pichon appears to have carefully calibrated the vocal production to suit the cathedral’s reverberant space, allowing resonance to enrich the sound without obscuring textual clarity or contrapuntal detail as can be the case with lesser choirs.

 

The solos and duets were consistently superb, and the principal singers offered exemplary models of liturgical singing—poised, focused and expressive.

 

It is difficult to imagine there is a better choir anywhere.

 

Kym Clayton

 

When: 2 to 3 Mar

Where: St Peter’s Cathedral

Bookings: Closed