Enthusiastically greeted at its premiere in 2004, Thomas Adès's first full-scale opera returns to Covent Garden as an assured, fully matured work with many of the reservations evident on first hearing banished.
This staging has also been seen in Strasbourg and Copenhagen, enabling it to find strength and voice. Crucially for the audience, too, the chance of a second hearing allows the work to be judged not on novelty but on enduring quality.
Adès has tinkered only minimally with the score, excising a couple of bars. Tom Cairns's elegant, surrealist production is still effective, with Moritz Junge's designs providing magical simplicity, like an electrified Yves Tanguy painting.
The excellent cast is largely unchanged, led by Simon Keenlyside's masterly Prospero and including Philip Langridge as a bereft King and Ian Bostridge, shape-shifted into an emaciated Grayson Perry, haunting as Caliban.
Tony Spence's Ferdinand and his new Miranda, Kate Royal, made the most of their sensuous love music.
Cyndia Sieden repeated her stunning, silvery coloratura as Ariel.
Meredith Oakes's libretto is unfussy and clear, with Adès adding lyricism and drama through vivid scoring, memorable for volleys of chorale-like brass and bewitching use of bells. The ROH orchestra, conducted by the composer, shone.
This revival coincides with an Adès festival at the Barbican and events in Paris, New York and Los Angeles. No longer the maverick boy wonder, this 36-year-old has proved he's the real thing.
In rep until 26 March (020 7304 4000).
The Royal Opera: The Tempest
Royal Opera House
Floral Street, WC2E 9DD
