Friday, April 30, 2010

Adès' The Tempest

I used to write long essays giving advice to composers wanting to compose opera. One sentence was "Your job is to make the singers sound good." I sort of gave up because it became apparent that no one was listening. None of the singers in Thomas Adès' The Tempest sound good at all.

Review previous essays:
Composing Opera
Advice to Composers

It's a good subject for an opera but very painful to listen to. This is based on a DVD from House of Opera from the ROH production. I would describe the style as neo-second Viennese school, but entirely without Berg's lyricism.

I will repeat my most basic advice here: If you never go to the opera and don't really like singing, do not repeat DO NOT write an opera.

3 comments:

  1. I heard it at Covent Garden and I have the recording, so I can only guess you must have been unlucky and heard a bad performance. Of course, there are some roles which explore extremes of vocal colour and range (as did Handel, Mozart and Verdi), but I found these amazingly successful - in particular, Cynthia Sieden as Ariel may not have been able to pronounce the words clearly but the sounds she made were captivating, and thrillingly accompanied by the orchestral textures.

    I would have thought the lyricism in the piece was hard to miss, especially in the second half - Caliban's aria, Gonzalo's aria, the Passacaglia, the melancholy wordless soaring of Ariel once Prospero has freed her... If you haven't heard the recording, which features a wonderful cast (Keenlyside, Summers, Toby Spence, Kate Royal, Bostridge, Langridge), I hope that can change your mind.

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  2. I might have been in a bad mood that day. Maybe I should give it another try. Lots of people really like it.

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  3. Anonymous10:13 PM

    If you can make it to the USC production of Lee Hoiby's TEMPEST in November you will not be disappointed.

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