Calm after the storm

Stakes were high, the excitement palpable. Composers were out in force, to support, spy, envy. After numerous alarms and rumours of lastminute panic, Thomas Adès's first full-scale opera has received its premiere at Covent Garden played under the baton of the 32-year-old composer in a stylish and sometimes magical production by Tom Cairns.

This is Adès's first stage work since Powder Her Face (1995), a lurid exploration of the scandalous Duchess of Argyll. It is worlds away, musically and in subject matter. The Tempest was not his first choice. There had to be compelling reasons for him to prefer familiar late Shakespeare to a challenging original libretto on a tough contemporary subject by a major living writer - James Fenton's The Love Bomb - which he had first considered. It was a case of "few dead" or "all dead", Adès chose the former and in so doing dodged controversy.

The Tempest is hardly virgin territory. Dryden, Auden, Tchaikovsky, Peter Greenaway, have all had a go. Could Adès add anything new? On first hearing, the answer is a qualified yes. He is too good a composer to flunk it, too versatile and capable of exquisite aural invention to

pass up an opportunity of making something beautiful. From the standard sized orchestra, amplified with tuba and contrabassoon, tuned glockenspiel and, allegedly, a bunch of dried honesty, he conjured veiled and mysterious sounds.

But beauty is not enough. After a brilliant storm, the first act dragged, with a surprising lack of variety in the vocal writing. A startling exception was Ariel, sung somewhere above the stratosphere by the American coloratura soprano Cyndia Sieden. The idea of expressing Prospero's ambiguous wisdom with unadorned rhythmic simplicity must have looked good on paper but sounded colourless, a waste of the superb Simon Keenlyside, one of the dream cast of British singers.

Only in the final act did Adès seem to find his true voice. The orchestra exploded and bubbled excitingly.

Supporting roles stole the limelight: every time Christopher Maltman (Sebastian) opened his mouth he commanded attention. So too did Philip Langridge, ineffably moving as the mourning King of Naples, and Gwynne Howell as the ageing Gonzalo.

The love music of Ferdinand (Toby Spence) and Miranda (Christine Rice) was ravishing and tenderly sung. As the halfsavage Caliban, Ian Bostridge, fetchingly dressed as Twiggy styled by Gormenghast, gave his all though the role proved less pivotal than expected.

The opera's final ensemble, complete with Purcell-inspired ground bass, reminded us that Adès is a talent in a million.

Meredith Oakes's libretto after Shakespeare is clear, lean and full of helpful verbal repetition. But did we really need subtitles? Has the world gone mad? Tom Cairns's and Moritz Junge's semi-abstract designs, suggestive of Hepworth and Yannis Kounellis, looked handsome but left the action unfocused. In short, The Tempest was episodically beautiful and exactly what the ROH needed: the patrons were not scared and the scared weren't patronised. This was the slightly too friendly face of modern opera.

The Royal Opera: The Tempest