Nymanites will rejoice. The pulse, the raunchy textures and the restless alternation of metre (either between 'numbers' or within them) all hail from a familiar work-bench: this is miniaturist minimalism taken to epic extremes. The sound is unmistakable: hear it at your local record store and you'll be either reaching for your wallet, or racing for the door. A 'Prospero Express', I thought, with 20 carriages (musical sections), each housing a different slice of the action—hyperactive restless, moody (the score is far darker than various of its concert or film-based predecessors) and featuring some imaginative word-painting. Not that Shakespeare's The Tempest could possibly serve you as a libretto—not unless you have scissors and paste handy. ''Very heavily and idiosyncratically edited'', admits the composer. And how! Seasoned Shakespearians in search of the expected continuity will be thrown into relative confusion, much as they'll wonder at the three singers being ''voices rather than roles, carriers of the text rather than characters''. The upshot of this is that Prospero can be sung as one, or two, or even three; while, vocally speaking, he can 'become' Miranda at any point in the drama. Nyman ushers us in with Miranda as heard at the beginning of Act 1 scene 2, he takes a line or two, then skips half a dozen before picking up the drift again. The third number (''... be't to fly, two swim...'') joins Ariel mid-sentence; the Fourth focuses on a response from Prospero, and so on. Only one of The Tempest's custom-built songs is included (''The master, the gunner, the boatswain, and I''), the others having already been set in the film, Prospero's Books which, incidentally, is a totally separate score.
Noises, Sounds and Sweet Airs grew out of an opera-ballet (La Princesse de Milan) where the dancers also sang. Its strongest claim to dramatic validity—away from the stage, that is centres on its specific tone and atmosphere, which is sometimes bleak and sometimes warmingly lyrical, whereas the actual 'libretto' doesn't approach the focused, plot-oriented adaptations that Verdi Berlioz and others employed in the service of the Bard. But then, I doubt it was meant to.
In drawing overall conclusions (always a dubious procedure with a new piece), I rarely sensed that the music had been seeded, even particularly nourished, by the words. Rather, I suspect that had Nyman taken a notion to set Wallace Stevens or Stevie Smith (to quote just two names at random), the net result would have been similarly mobile, aromatic, sensual and catchy. The performance itself seems fairly expert, save for one or two instances where the soprano's relatively high tessitura gives Catherine Bott cause for some strain. The recording is excellent.'