Thanks to friends in medium-high places, I have come by a video of The Tempest, Thomas Adès’ new opera produced by London’s Royal Opera and broadcast by the BBC in mid-February, and it is a work of extraordinary beauty. Meredith Oakes wrote the text, freely and imaginatively built from Shakespeare’s outlines; Adès himself conducted the marvelous performance, with Simon Keenlyside as the Prospero and an amazing coloratura soprano, Cyndia Seaden, as an Ariel who is truly a creature of light and air. The music is like nothing of Adès I have previously heard; it has a soft luster that seems at times both old and new; at moments of particular poetic elegance it moves with a gentle syncopation called hemiola that Henry Purcell also used most eloquently. A final ensemble, set in that rhythm, leaves you dizzy with delight. When may we have it here, please?
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