Now that Thanksgiving has passed and December is here, the holiday season has surely begun. Just in time, John Adams will conduct three performances of his 2000 Nativity oratorio, El Niño, by the San Francisco Symphony, at San Francisco's Davies Symphony Hall tonight, tomorrow night, and Saturday night. The performances mark the start of Adams's two-week residency with the San Francisco Symphony, part of the orchestra's Project San Francisco.

In tonight's opening performance and on Saturday's final concert, Dawn Upshaw will reprise the role she originated in the San Francisco world premiere back in 2001 and which she performed for the original recording of the piece, on Nonesuch. (The recording also features Willard White and the late Lorraine Hunt Lieberson.) Jessica Rivera, who starred in Adams's 2006 opera A Flowering Tree (of which the San Francisco Symphony gave the US premiere in 2007), will perform the soprano role on December 3. Mezzo-soprano Michelle DeYoung and bass-baritone Jonathan Lemalu will appear in all three performances.

Upshaw, DeYoung, and Lemalu will participate in an informal Q&A immediately after the December 2 performance. Adams will be signing CDs in the Symphony Store following the December 3 concert. And prior to each concert, musicologist Susan Key will lead a talk about the program, free to ticket holders.

“John Adams captured the intimacy, mystery, and apocalyptic nature of the Nativity story in a thoroughly contemporary idiom," the Wall Street Journal has written of El Niño, "fusing his well-known minimalist style with a rich blend of text in English, Spanish, and Latin for an effect ultimately as timeless as the story itself.” The Philadelphia Inquirer writes: "A masterpiece reflects and defines its time; El Niño does so both musically and in its choice of texts."

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Project San Francisco's focus on Adams continues next week, when San Francisco Symphony Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas leads the orchestra in the composer’s 1985 SFS commission Harmonielehre, December 8-11. The composition was inspired by a dream Adams had in which he was driving across the Bay Bridge and saw an oil tanker on the surface of the water abruptly turn upright and take off like a rocket. The SFS performed the world premiere of Harmonielehre in March 1985 under the direction of then-music director Edo de Waart, the performers captured on the Nonesuch recording of the piece.

Finally, on December 12, musicians from the San Francisco Symphony will explore some of Adams's more intimate works—Road Movies, Shaker Loops, Hallelujah Junction, and his String Quartet—in an SFS Chamber Music concert.

For more information on any of these events, visit sfsymphony.org.

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To pick up any of the albums in the John Adams Nonesuch catalog, with high-quality MP3s of the album included at checkout, head to the Nonesuch Store. As with all CDs, LPs, and DVDs at nonesuch.com, they are now 33% off the suggested retail price as part of the Nonesuch Store's 3rd anniversary sale.