The Tempest is an Opera

The words “back by popular demand” aren’t often applied to modern operas, except perhaps in jest. Yet popular demand has brought Thomas Adãs’s magical musical take on Shakespeare’s magical musical isle back just three years after its Royal Opera premiere. In the interim The Tempest has been acclaimed in the US and on the Continent. It’s a genuine hit, and you can’t say that about many recent British operas.

Monday’s superb revival — with most of the original cast back, sounding even more assured than after the scrambled preparations in 2004 — confirmed that the work is an ingenious melding of the familiar and the startlingly original. That applies not just to Adãs’s music but also to Meredith Oakes’s terse, tangy, rhyming rewrite of Shakespeare. As in Purcell’s Fairy Queen and Bernstein’s West Side Story, the Bard’s words get short shrift. And the plot, too, is tweaked so that the love of Miranda and Ferdinand overtly confounds the power of Simon Keenlyside’s immensely sung Prospero.

But it’s the eerie, airy music that drives the drama. Here, too, are recognisable things: arias and cunningly weaved ensembles — none better than a sumptuous Purcellian passacaglia of reconciliation. But they exist in new sound-worlds that define character and context with diamond clarity.

Best of all, the music blooms in symbolic reflection of the redemptive love seeping through the play. After the jagged shards of brass in the storm, the baleful orchestral grunts under Prospero’s vengeful lines, and the bizarre, stratospheric squeaking of Cyndia Sieden’s demented stick-insect Ariel (pictured ) Adãs conjures some meltingly lyrical set-pieces. Flecked by ecstatic string trills there’s a gorgeous lovers’ duet, radiantly sung by Toby Spence and Kate Royal (the latter making an ardent if consonant-free Royal Opera debut). Then comes a nostalgic solo for Ian Bostridge’s rueful Caliban (a wonderful creation, like a heavy-metal headbanger turned scarecrow). Finally there’s a wistful lullaby for Caliban and Ariel that evokes the feeling of little lives being rounded with a sleep, even if the actual line is never sung. Tom Cairns’s production, played amid the glowing cubes, flying gymnasts and basking alligators of Moritz Junge’s surreal set, still looks look like a bad night in an Ibiza disco. But with fine performances from Philip Langridge’s anguished King of Naples and Donald Kaasch’s malevolent Antonio, and with the composer himself conducting what really did sound like Shakespeare’s “thousand twangling instruments”, this is a show that gives one hope that an art form as old as The Tempest itself has been dazzlingly remade for the 21st century.