“But I had always thought of it as an oratorio,” along the lines of Handel’s “Messiah.”

“My soul’s above the sea and whistling a dream,” he sang, a passage from the Nativity oratorio “El Niño” by John Adams, in which Tines makes his Met debut this month.

While the oratorio’s story is fictional, it is based on the true story of 20,000 to 30,000 Jews who reached the Shanghai International Settlement.

In Handel’s oratorio “Israel in Egypt,” which the New York Philharmonic performed in October, Jews are living in captivity across the Red Sea from their ancient homeland.

Driven more by imagery than plot, he has been best suited to staging oratorios or concert works like Mozart’s Requiem and Mahler’s Second Symphony.