Keep everyone guessing

For more than a decade, Thomas Ades, who is 32, has been hailed as the most impressive British composer of his generation. His 1997 orchestral work, “Asyla,” is a knockout, much played: Last season, Simon Rattle opened his first concert as music director of the Berlin Philharmonic with it. Ades’ widely produced chamber opera, “Powder Her Face,” is a naughty romp with sensationalist sex that, after nine years, still stuns.

Even so, as Ades’ first large-scale opera, “The Tempest,” approached its premiere here Tuesday, attracting international attention, a testy press once overeager to dub him the next Benjamin Britten began speculating that Ades, never comfortable with celebrity, might have peaked.

After all, why else would he refuse to do interviews? Wasn’t there something flighty about the transformation of his schoolboy appearance into an aspect more Oscar Wildean and then back again to clean-cut? Did he really have a musical identity, and, if so, was he a restless romantic, modernist, surrealist, postmodernist or what?

By the time Tuesday rolled around, “The Tempest” was being called a make-or-break work. Dazzling but flawed, it turned out to be neither.

In fact, the opera was finished only last Thursday, when Ades delivered the overture. The Royal Opera did its best to maintain a news blackout, but reports leaked out that some singers were apprehensive. They didn’t get their parts until December, and last-minute changes were being made practically up to the closed dress rehearsal Saturday.

Ades is, of course, in good company not only with composers working down to the wire but also with those attracted to Shakespeare’s most musical play. Mozart’s “Magic Flute” was probably “Tempest”-inspired. But no actual “Tempest” opera has caught on. The best I know is John Eaton’s microtonal version, with a literate libretto by Andrew Porter.

Meredith Oakes’ libretto for Ades has no comparable pretensions. Oakes fashioned a new text that expertly simplifies and rearranges Shakespeare’s plot. Presumably, she invented short rhymed couplets in order to give the music space. A line given to Prospero, the enigmatic magician/hero, at the end of the opera -- “Calm your mind / Your woes are left behind” -- is typical.

But banal language turns the human characters in the enchanted story into bores. Prospero, a Milanese ruler expelled to an island with his daughter, Miranda, is one of Shakespeare’s most intriguing creations. Not here. Though the role was powerfully sung and athletically acted by Simon Keenlyside, Oakes’ hackneyed lines and Ades’ pompous chorales, underpinned by tubby brass and double basses, make him a caricature of Wagner’s Wotan.

There isn’t much to be said, either, for the shipwrecked noblemen held captive by Prospero’s sorcery. Still, this is a bewitched island -- and Ades is a master of the musical magic spell.

The composer’s most brazen contrivance was to write the role of the half-human, half-smelly-fish Caliban for Ian Bostridge -- a tall, slight, refined tenor. Bostridge’s Caliban -- a sly, amusing, almost regal trickster -- personified elusive strangeness as his vocal lines spun silken neo-Baroque melisma over stilted poetry.

The sprite Ariel, on the other hand, is pure dazzle. Here the words don’t matter, because the vocal line is so high you can’t understand them. A native Angeleno, Cynthia Sieden -- the one American in the cast -- got the loudest ovation of any of the singers, and she earned it by pealing off high E’s all evening long.

Repeated hearings may reveal more sense to Ades’ score. But the first impression it makes is of unpredictability and changefulness. Ades is neither a long-line nor a single-style composer, but he is an extremely colorful one. Many other composers haunt his “Tempest.” Britten and Tippett frequent the first two acts. By the third, when wondrous musical magic dominates, Purcell and Ravel are closer to its spirit.

Ades’ changeability requires a very flexible conductor and a highly imaginative stage director. The conductor was the composer himself, and he capably held everyone together and got marvelously colorful playing from the orchestra. But I suspect a more experienced conductor would have brought a higher level of dramatic vividness.

The production, by Tom Cairns, tries busily to be weird and hip. Cairns and Moritz Junge’s set is dominated by a revolving wedge that resembles a laptop computer and proved a jungle gym to climb over. Funny items litter the island: a yellow rock for Ariel, an alligator, a dinosaur. There are flying dancers in the storm and wiggling laser beams. From a seat high up and far from the stage, the visual impression was mainly of distant clutter, although the sound was intense.

Contributing to the theatrical clutter, though with vocally commanding performances, were Philip Langridge (King of Naples) and Christopher Maltman (Sebastian, his brother). As Miranda and Ferdinand, Christine Rice and Toby Spence were conventional lovers. John Daszak oozed sleaze as Prospero’s evil brother, Antonio. Gwynne Howell delivered Gonzalo’s platitudes. Lawrence Zazzo and Stephen Richardson, the comic characters Trinculo and Stefano, were unfunny.

“The Tempest” is a co-production with opera companies in Copenhagen and Strasbourg, France. It probably should have started with those companies, where it could have been developed out of the limelight. Yet, though Ades is no longer an overnight sensation, he keeps you wondering what he will do next.