El Niño, John Adams’s nativity oratorio, was premiered in 2000. He went for a radical retelling of the Christmas story from a woman’s perspective with director Peter Sellars, his long-time collaborator. The opera mixes biblical and liturgical texts, with others pulled from the Apocrypha; a medieval carol, a mystery play and – most strikingly – poems by Latin-American women, which imbue the work with the kind of vibe familiar to anyone who saw Sellars’s English National Opera production of The Fairy Queen, which similarly incorporated material from a modern Nicaraguan writer, Rosario Aguilar. When it works, it works stunningly well, bringing a magical jolt of immediacy to the narrative. When less successful, it shades into longueurs and self-indulgence.