ONDON, Feb. 22 — An absurdly high level of expectation attended the premiere of "The Tempest," the first large-scale opera by the British composer Thomas Adès, which was introduced on Feb. 10 by the Royal Opera at Covent Garden. In the mid-1990's Mr. Adès, then in his 20's, was already being hailed as the great hope of British music and the most accomplished British musician over all since Benjamin Britten. In recent years Mr. Adès has produced a roster of bracing orchestra, chamber and choral works. But could he put it all together for a major Covent Garden commission?
Others can assess how well he has met the unreasonable expectations. What I can say after attending Friday night's performance here is that this young composer, just 32, has written an entrancing opera, with a libretto by Meredith Oakes, adapted from the Shakespeare play. When Mr. Adès, who also conducted, joined the cast onstage at the end, he was given a hero's ovation.
The local press has been full of articles about Mr. Adès's frantic rush to finish the opera on time. When he began the project, he was unsettled on the subject and had a different librettist. By the time he had Ms. Oakes's libretto in hand, he had only two years to compose this ambitious score: three acts of roughly 45 minutes each. Six weeks before the premiere, cast members were still receiving vocal parts in the mail.
Yet despite some cumbersome passages that could use more attention, Mr. Adès's arresting compositional voice comes through almost continually: his ear for pungent harmony; his layering of every-which-way contrapuntal lines, which somehow remain audible; his impish blending of diverse musical styles. "The Tempest" is the work of a composer who is prodigiously talented and who knows it.
Choosing Shakespeare's elusive play took a leap of imagination. Is it a comedy? A morality tale? A fantastical epic of magic, fairies and avenging mortals? The opera retains the essentials of the plot. Prospero, the rightful duke of Milan, who was brutally usurped by his brother, has been living for 12 years with his daughter, Miranda, on a mysterious isle inhabited by spirits and the man-monster Caliban. The action commences when Prospero, who is also a magician, incites a violent sea storm that lands his enemies on the island, where he proceeds to teach them a lesson.
Shakespeare's language, with its rolling iambic rhythms, has been replaced with Ms. Oakes's rhymed phrases. On the page her snappy couplets can seem cutesy:
Fair Milan
Stooping stands
Robbed of
grace
Dark of face.
But the lines were meant to be sung, and they carry Mr. Adès's music well, especially the asymmetrical lines, which allow him to indulge his penchant for meter that shifts by the measure.
The motivations and ambiguities of Shakespeare's characters are of necessity simplified. In the opera Prospero, portrayed by the charismatic and elegant British baritone Simon Keenlyside, is a fearsome figure of righteous indignation. To me Shakespeare's Prospero seems a morally upright man who calls his enemies to account but has long been disposed to forgive them.
But great music always abounds with ambiguity, especially this haunting score, a complete departure from the lascivious, hypercharged 1995 chamber opera "Powder Her Face." The isle of Shakespeare's "Tempest" is "full of noises, sounds and sweet airs," Caliban says in the play. That is what Mr. Adès provides.
After the tumultuous, gnashing orchestral music that conjures the storm at sea as the opera begins, the tempests subside and Miranda (the soprano Christine Rice) arrives. She justifiably suspects her father of causing the shipwreck. Mr. Adès enshrouds her words with choralelike harmonic underpinnings, which move to the irregular verbal rhythms of the text. The surface allure is deceptive though. Busy counterpoint, ominous inner motifs and countless discombobulating subtleties teem within the radiant orchestral gloss.
Some of the vocal writing is torturously difficult. Ariel, the airy spirit who serves Prospero but yearns for freedom, was conceived for a coloratura soprano able to leap about her upper range with the demonic abandon of Mozart's Queen of the Night. The unhinged music she first sings is replete with high E's. Still, the idea of the coloratura who conveys frenzy through fusillades of high notes has become a cliché. I listened to Cyndia Sieden, the production's brilliant Ariel, amazed by her daring but fearful for her vocal health.
