WHEN JOHN ADAMS wrote his 1990 opera, "The Death of Klinghoffer," about the hijacking of a cruise ship in the Mediterranean, he was pilloried for having turned terrorism into art and making Palestinian gunmen sing. Adams had used the news too bluntly, his critics felt, and the flush of righteousness they experienced only intensified in the decade that followed, when other composers, too, wrote timely stage works, giving rise to a genre dismissively dubbed CNN Opera.

More recently, U.S poet laureate Billy Collins, asked for predictions about an artistic response to Sept. 11, warned against the danger of confronting events directly, quoting Emily Dickinson on the subject. " 'Tell the truth but tell it slant.' You have to go through a side door," he added.

Though Adams could not have known it at the time, the composer wound up following the advice of Collins and Dickinson in writing "El Nino," a staged Nativity oratorio that had its first performances in Paris nearly a year ago and recently has been released on compact disc. At its world premiere, the piece struck people as an apt and optimistic way to mark the 2,000th anniversary. Ten months later, it seems far more than that: a deeply anti-fundamentalist religious work, eclectic and ecumenical and, most important, the product of a dazzling imagination working with minimal constraints.

"El Nino" was crafted for the theater and intended to receive the visual ministrations of Peter Sellars. Eventually we will see it that way here, since one of the piece's co-commissioners was Lincoln Center. In the meantime, we have the CD, an ingot handed out by the label Nonesuch, which labors in the classical music recording business the way monasteries did in Europe's illiterate age. Other companies are losing money, shedding staff, winnowing artist rosters and resorting to ever more craven repackaging ploys. Nonesuch bestows on us "El Nino," sung by the original team of Dawn Upshaw, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson and Willard White, and conducted by Kent Nagano.

It opens with an Adams signature: pulsing minor chords, plushly orchestrated and spangled with the tinkle of a folk guitar. This is the work of a composer who long ago set aside the austerity and lengths of minimalism but still enjoys using its burbling harmonies, riverlike rolling and eddies and whirlpools of rhythm.

"I sing of a maiden," the anonymous medieval poem begins, but already things become more complicated. The "I" is actually a "we" - the chorus, splintering the text in a cascade of syllables. After a throbbing crescendo, enter the angel Gabriel - he, too, multiplied and divided among three countertenors, a heavenly barbershop trio. At times Mary is a soprano, at others a mezzo, and the baritone doubles as Joseph and Herod. The "I" is never fixed.

Assigning a voice to several different roles belongs to the conventions of oratorio, but Adams, who professes "shaky and unformed" religious beliefs, goes well beyond tradition to create a piece with a constantly shifting point of view. The heart of the first section is "The Annunciation," told not in biblical terms but in the first-person reflections - in Spanish - of Rosario Castellanos, a Mexican poet who died in 1974. "El Nino" is a pageant of motherhood as well as birth, and it draws on layers of female voices: Whose voice are we hearing here: Mary's, Castellano's or that of the stirringly expressive Lieberson?

Against a broad expanse of seamless string tremolos, dotted here and there by glinting notes like stars plucked on a guitar, a celesta or a harp, the vocal melody slowly unwinds, billowing gently. Adams is a master at playing a tune out like a fishing line; it's the same talent that gave Pat Nixon's aria in "Nixon in China" its dreamy charm.

But birth is also an act of violence committed from the inside out, as Castellano's poem notes - "Because you were to break my bones, my bones, at your arrival, break," the mother says to her god- child - and Adams smuggles pain into the score without breaking the reverie. "Me flagelaba" ("I was whipped") the mezzo sings in a snapping leap as the guitarist throws his fingers in a strum across the strings. The tremolos crest, the trombones come in, the basses take up urgent syncopations. Then the whole thing passes, and for the moment the singer is left with her tender rage, a rippling accompaniment and a more jagged vocal line. There are not many composers who can render ambivalence with so much grace.

"El Nino" joins the chain of European religious concert pieces extending back to Handel and beyond, and its sources are hardly hidden. As in "Messiah," which Adams confessed he wanted to write anew, its language is direct and its delivery crystalline - there is hardly a word that cannot be understood.

Like Handel, he has a natural feel for the qualities of showmanship in music, and the piece's sweep includes both the grandeur and intimacy of religious experience. He commands, too, a panoramic grasp of references, and this score is replete with disparate and familiar gestures: the emotion-packed recitations of Baroque opera, the punch of a well-made pop tune, the precisely articulated sentiments of a Schumann song, the grand choral canvases of Britten, Mozart and Verdi, the boogie-woogie bass lines of vintage jazz.

Adams sets mostly English words - from the Bible, the Apocrypha and a clutch of poets - but the second section, like the first, reaches its heart in Spanish, again through the words of Castellanos. "Memorial de Tlatelolco" comes right after Matthew's terse summary of the children's massacre that Herod ordered, and it juxtaposes ancient and recent iniquities of different totalitarian regimes.

Tlatelolco was Mexico's Kent State and Tiananmen Square: In October 1968, government soldiers attacked a crowd of restive students in a Mexico City square, killing several hundred. Castellanos' poem and the aria Adams wrote for soprano Dawn Upshaw are less about that bloody evening than about the morning after, when both the blood and the history had been expeditiously scrubbed away. The weather dominated the headlines, Castellanos writes, and on television no bulletins interrupted the flow of entertainment.

Adams knows how to portray a lie. Upshaw serenades the dawn in larklike tones, pleasantly describing a pleasant morning against a dewy lilt of plucked strings and harp. But four quiet blasts of tubas and trombones act like stubborn stains on the cobblestones. Indignation soon rises to the soprano's gorge, and while the plucking goes impassively on, she swoops to her lowest, throatiest tones.

Adams is a New Englander by birth and a Californian by choice, so Tlatelolco is not his battle, which is perhaps why it belongs in this oratorio. He can treat its story as he does the biblical tales - at one remove of passion.

Like Handel again, he depicts barbarity without indulging in it, filtering rage through a civilizing scrim. At key moments, string tremolos gather force, lifting the chorus, which then breaks off in a Bach-like stroke of silence. Dissonance sometimes washes in, adding brushstrokes of mystery, before subsiding. But there is nothing raw or jagged in his work, no primal orchestral shrieks, no wild-eyed whispers, no Wagnerian riptides of ecstasy.

Instead, Adams answers savagery with elegance, sublimating elemental emotions - pain, loss, terror - into a tapestry of shining threads. That is how an artist of great talent and uncertain faith confronts the sometimes ghastly histories of worship: by crafting an object whose glory is beyond doubt.