A Musical Tempest

Shakespeare’s presumed last play is a favourite with musicians and composers.  The Tempest, is suitably abstract and metaphorical – timeless and set on an island, with the old magician Prospero ruling over spirits of air and land in Ariel and Caliban. And it starts with an immense storm.

QSO’s Chief Conductor Umberto Clerici has curated a program of Shakespeare’s words and the music he inspired from four composers.   Arthur Honegger’s Prelude to the Tempest leaps ferociously into the stormy sea, with repeated waves of crescendo from wind and brass, clashing percussion and screeching strings.  It’s both thrilling and repetitive, really just like an enduring storm, never letting up for any softer phrases or narrative.  Clerici cheekily introduces it as a work that’s a bit “messy”.

Appearing just two years later in 1925, Jean Sibelius’ diverse Incidental Music was composed for each episode of The Tempest as then staged at the Court Theatre in Copenhagen. This full theatrical range is abbreviated here to movements of delicate innocence, mournful then conspiratorial scenes, an elegant masque, calming winds and the misunderstood native monstrosity of Caliban.

John Bell introduces the Sibelius giving voice to what are sometimes confusing short dialogues between Prospero and other players, without enough variety of characterisation or microphone support in the vast Concert Hall.  Later though, as Prospero alone abandons his magic, Bell is sublime finally reaching to Sibelius’ song of resolution.

As is Henry Purcell’s courtly but exuberant overture, also composed at the end of his life, The Enchanted Island.  Clerici brings the concert home with Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s magnificent The Tempest, first with an advancing power like a colossal liner, blossoming into tempestuous dramas and swirls, climaxing into new weathers of sliding strings.  

This program was mostly new to the SSO players (and Clerici was once one of them, as principal cello), but the conductor keeps this mix of musics, centuries and theatre on a tight rein.

Martin Portus

Photograph of John Bell by Pierre Toussaint. Photographs of Sydney Symphony by Daniel Boud