By Georgia Rowe
CORRESPONDENT

HOW MIGHT a contemporary composer approach the Nativity story in our cynical age? What would it sound like, and how would it look? Those questions drew more than one curious music lover to Thursday's San Francisco Symphony program at Davies Hall.

In this case, the composer was John Adams, and the work was "El Nino." Adams' luminous new Nativity oratorio -- a co-commission of the S.F. Symphony and Paris' Theatre du Chatelet, where the work had its world premiere last month -- made its much-anticipated American debut in Thursday's concert. Performances continue through tonight, and tickets are scarce. Get one if you can.

Those in attendance at Thursday's opening -- a capacity crowd that included many of the Bay Area's musical movers and shakers -- may or may not have felt moved by the spirit of the 2-hour, 20-minute performance. Yet no one could deny having witnessed something wholly original in the work, which is one of the most beguiling hybrids to hit town in years.

In retelling the story of the birth of Jesus, Adams' primary challenge is how to make a story that is both arcane and familiar into something contemporary and dramatic. He meets this challenge by drawing on a wide range of source material. Biblical texts, obscure Gnostic Infancy Gospels and ecstatic verses by Hildegard von Bingen and Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz are interspersed with blunt 20th-century poetry by Latin American writers Rosario Castellanos, Vincente Huidobro and Gabriela Mistral.

And, Adams has engaged that most modern of post-modern directors, Peter Sellars, to stage the work. Sellars, whose updated productions of operas by Mozart and Handel are legendary, and who created the first productions of Adams' "Nixon in China" and "The Death of Klinghoffer," uses video, dance, movement and gesture to tell the Nativity story in "El Nino." The narrative unfolds on several levels, often to mesmerizing effect.

Sellars bridges the centuries with visuals, both onstage and in video projected on a large overhead screen. As films show a contemporary Mary and Joseph with their baby in the barrios of Los Angeles, on the beach and on the freeway, a trio of dancers -- Daniela Graa, Nora Kimball and Michael Schumacher -- echo the story in movement. This is no medieval pageant; the video often recalls the mundane imagery of magical realist writers such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Jose Rivera. Lighting by James F. Ingalls is stark and contemporary. The performers are barefoot, but dressed in costumes by Leon Wiebers that might have come from the Gap.

Kent Nagano conducts the S.F. Symphony. There are three vocal soloists -- soprano Dawn Upshaw, mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson and bass-baritone Willard White -- who sing the roles of Mary, Joseph, Herod, God and others. A trio of countertenors, Paul Hillier's Theater of Voices, provides glowing commentary. Vance George's S.F. Symphony Chorus and the Piedmont Children's Choirs under the direction of Robert Geary handle the choral parts with massed power.

Adams, the Berkeley-based composer who became inextricably linked with the minimalist movement in the 1960s, has given "El Nino" one of his most masterful scores. The composer's characteristic repeated figures hum along with scintillating energy, the orchestration is endlessly inventive, and when Adams spins a lyrical line, it becomes a thing of radiant beauty.

Or so it was at Thursday's performance. "El Nino" may never get a better cast than this one. With Nagano driving the orchestra with fierce precision, the soloists yielded sublime vocalism at every turn. Upshaw's soprano remains one of the most pure, flexible voices of our time, and Lieberson's luxuriant, wonderfully rounded mezzo gave each new utterance an air of rich sensuality. White's forceful delivery lent the work an apt dimension of drama.

The Spanish-language texts elicit a particularly inspired response from Adams and his singers. The composer's setting of Castellanos' "Memorial de Tlatelolco" -- a thoroughly modern lament written in response to a 1968 uprising in Mexico City -- fits remarkably well in this Nativity, and Upshaw's performance of it was one of the evening's most eloquent outpourings. The oratorio ends with the children of the Piedmont Choirs producing celestial sound in another Castellanos text, "Una Palmera," beautifully accompanied by solo guitar.

One noticed a few empty seats after intermission, and the fault may be with the visuals. The dancers are wonderful, but there are moments that feel as if Sellars, to whom the oratorio is dedicated, has overburdened the singers with movement. And portions of the video -- scenes in cramped kitchens and laundry rooms, ugly backdrops of coffee shops, oil refineries and parking lots -- threaten to cancel the beauties of the score. But perhaps that's the whole point of "El Nino." In the 21st century, Adams seems to suggest, miracles may happen where we least expect them.