This link leads to an excerpt from composer Paul Moravec's Pulitzer Prize-winning composition Tempest Fantasy, based on themes from William Shakespeare's The Tempest.

The excerpt, "Sweet Airs," is the fourth movement of the piece, and is played by Trio Solisti (Maria Bachmann, violin, Alexis Pia Gerlach, cello, and Jon Klibonoff, piano) accompanied by clarinetist Alan Kay. They perform Tempest Fantasy at the Port Townsend Chamber Music Festival, August 10, 2007, at the Joseph F. Wheeler Theater, with Paul Moravec in residence.   

"Tempest Fantasy is a musical meditation on various characters, moods, situations, and lines of text from my favorite Shakespeare play, The Tempest," Moravec writes. "Rather than trying to depict these elements in programmatic terms, the music simply uses them as points of departure for flights of purely musical fancy."

"The first three movements spring from the nature and selected speeches of the three eponymous individuals. The fourth movement begins from Caliban's uncharacteristically elegant speech from Act III, scene 2:

'Be not afeard: the isle is full of noises, Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not.'

"The fifth movement is the most 'fantastic' flight of all, elaborating on the numerous musical strands of the previous movements and drawing them all together into a convivial finale."

Tickets to the August 10 performance are available by calling Centrum at 360.385.3102, x117 and online at our secure Acteva site. In addition to Tempest Fantasy, that evening violist Helen Callus and pianist Robert Koenig will give a recital of Sergei Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet Suite. And violinist Hal Grossman, cellist Antonio Lysy, and pianist Robert Koenig will perform Bedrich Smetana's Piano Trio in G Minor, Op. 15.