Opening this week at the Royal Opera House Ades's Tempest has a libretto by Meredith Oakes which echoes but does not borrow Shakespeare's verse.
(Edited highlights of the panel's review taken from the teletext subtitles that are generated live for Newsnight Review.)
MARK LAWSON:
Michael Portillo, you are a keen
Wagnerian. This could have seemed
rather lightweight to you, but
did it?
MICHAEL PORTILLO:
No, it did not. I think it's
going to be a success. The night
we went there, the night of the
premiere, evidently it was a
success. It was greeted with
tremendous acclaim. I think
that's going to last. Although I
go to opera a lot, my ear isn't
good enough to hear music like
this on the first occasion and be
certain about its success. I
thought it had a wonderful
opening with The Tempest scene.
It had a magnificent quintet in
the last act. But already just
listening to those extracts there
for the second time, having heard
them in the theatre first, I was
already beginning to enjoy them
even more. It seemed a very
complete opera. I thoroughly
enjoyed the libretto. It's a
fully orchestrated, very
beautiful piece...
LISA JARDINE:
Poor Shakespeare!
PORTILLO:
No, I think it's a very
interesting reading of
Shakespeare, I think it has a lot
of originality. I thought the
staging was excellent. Altogether
I think this is something which
is a success, and here is a more
dangerous prediction, which I
think will last.
LAWSON:
Now Lisa, this
libretto, because it's not the
words of Shakespeare, it's very
often in rhyming couplets¿
JARDINE:
It's doggerel. It shouldn't be on
the surtitles. It's actually an
armature on which to hang this
fantastic music and fantastic
setting. And what is so exciting
and will make this opera last - I
just thought this was brilliant -
what will make it last is that
Thomas Ades is 32 and the
references inside this music, the
register of Ariel comes straight
out of Michael Nyman's score for
Prospero's books. The way that
Miranda is played takes a lot
from Toya Wilcox in the Derek
Jarman film. And then the final
quintet is out of the
Marriage of Figaro. You get this
incredible folding in of the
semi-popular, the high art from
the contemporary, and great
opera, so that you get a truly
contemporary bit of music, and
then the staging - the red box in
which Ferdinand is entranced by
Prospero, and the little red box
that matches it with the book
inside. The extraordinary
revolving set with its opening,
maybe a book against which people
lean and fall. I thought this was
fabulous and I thought the
ovation it got was genuine and
that it is going to go straight
into the repertoire.
HARI KUNZRU:
I beg to differ. For five minutes
at the beginning, I thought I was
in the presence of something
really extraordinary. The first
Ariel aria, where she really is
singing in this extraordinarily
intense pitch, it was hair-
raising. It was awesome. But
then, for me, the music slid into
something much more soupy and
much less adventurous. The set
was fantastic. The costumes
sucked. The libretto was
terrible. I thought the rhyming
couplets made the composer work
very, very hard to try and avoid
the glibness at the end of each
of these rhyming lines, so he
gave us sort of peculiar
intervals each time as a kind of
dress on the fact that actually
this libretto, which in both its
verse and the things it was
telling us:
"I am a man walking
into a room", "He is a man
walking into a room." Were simply
not very good. I agree with
Michael, I would like to listen
to the music more because I think
there is much more to find in the
music.
PORTILLO:
Wonderful commitment by the
singers, by the way. I find it
hard to imagine seeing another
group of people sing it.