The John Adams Passion

"Adams’s latest work, 'The Gospel According to the Other Mary,' had its première at the end of May, in Walt Disney Concert Hall, with the Los Angeles Philharmonic under the direction of Gustavo Dudamel. A Passion play in all but name, it is a huge, strange, turbulent creation, brushing against chaos. The modernist tradition of the dark sacred, of the radical sublime, is alive and well...."

From "Sacred Dissonance," The New Yorker, June 18, 2012. Audio extra on the iPad edition: “Who rips his flesh down the seams,” the opening chorus of Act II.