Marking its world staged premiere, Joseph Summer’s The Tempest brings Shakespeare’s final masterpiece to the operatic stage with vivid imagination and emotional depth. The opera—set to a libretto by the composer’s daughter, Eve Summer—transforms the tale of exile, forgiveness, and renewal into a richly layered musical world. Summer’s tonal yet adventurous score brims with ensemble writing of exceptional beauty, from tender duets to exuberant finales, offering a contemporary voice deeply attuned to Shakespeare’s spirit.

In his production concept, director Stefanos Koroneos reimagines Prospero as an exiled filmmaker clinging to a crumbling 1980s studio, where the island becomes a memory-scape of film, love, and trauma endlessly re-staged. The former audience risers transform into the island itself — an unstable terrain of platforms and elevation where characters grasp at power, freedom, and desire. Seated above, the audience occupies the eye of the camera: witness, director, and dreamer at once. This is a Tempest about authorship and obsession, where identity is staged and rewritten, and where control must finally dissolve into the possibility of release.

“Summer’s musical language is comfortably tonal but sophisticated, ceaselessly inventive and often gripping; he’s a vivid musical storyteller… an embarrassment of riches—the marvelous group numbers just keep coming, culminating in a blazingly celebratory climax.” — Opera News, review of 2015 studio recording of The Tempest