The Tempest, Royal Opera House, LondonLondon SinfoniettaQueen Elizabeth Hall, LondonMonteverdi Choir/English Baroque Soloists, Barbican Hall, London

Three years ago, intoxicated and frustrated in equal measure by the Covent Garden premiere of The Tempest, I wrote optimistically of a day when Thomas Adès would present a more polished and consistently brilliant version of his second opera. Where exquisite modern miniatures such as Richard Ayres's The Cricket Recovers have bloomed and withered in a few short weeks, heard only in the Aldeburgh and Almeida Festivals, The Tempest has thrived since its premiere, with revivals in Strasbourg and Copenhagen, and a new production in Sante Fe. Adès has therefore had ample opportunities to revise his score before its return to Covent Garden. But the changes I hoped for in 2004 have yet to be made.

The current revival cast's collective muscle-memory of Adès's counterintuitive vocal lines and designer-director Tom Cairns's vertiginous revolve has certainly lent the opera an air of greater cogency. Several members have already appeared in one or more runs of The Tempest, while Cyndia Sieden, who created the role she described as "Zerbinetta on helium", has sung Ariel in every performance. Adès's conducting is more confident and expressive, and the shimmering prelude to Act III and enchanting reinvention of "Mir ist so wunderbar" are still as beguiling as any great moments in a great opera. Even so, the work is as fault-ridden as it is flamboyant.

The gauche storm that opens the opera remains. More problematic is the angular word-setting. Ariel's stratospheric tinkling is merely the most obvious example of this, for Prospero (Simon Keenlyside), Caliban (Ian Bostridge), the King of Naples (Philip Langridge), and, to a lesser degree, Ferdinand (Toby Spence) all deliver librettist Meredith Oakes's hiccupy parsing of Shakespeare's verse in the same stilted metre, as though speaking English, loudly, to a Valencian bartender. Only Miranda (Kate Royal) is afforded a naturalistic variety of rhythm, dynamic, and speed, hence she is the only character to glow with humanity. Excellent performances from Royal, Keenlyside, Bostridge, Langridge, Spence, Jonathan Summers (Sebastian), and the orchestra and chorus, did little to dissuade me that Adès could have produced something much richer from the marriage of words and music than this coldly glamorous divertissement. But it is difficult to see what will provide the impetus for further revision when the world's opera houses have already fallen at his feet.

Exactly how rare strong word-setting is today was underlined in George Benjamin and London Sinfonietta's tribute to György Ligeti at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, which programmed Oliver Knussen's Requiem - Songs for Sue and Alexander Goehr's Behold the Sun after a ravishing, crystalline performance of the late, great composer's Ramifications and an utterly brilliant account of Melodien, and before a reading of his Piano Concerto that blazed, albeit unsteadily, under the fingers of Pierre-Laurent Aimard.

Programming any living British composer alongside Ligeti is tricky, and I can't have been alone in thinking that Kurtag's Messages of the Late Miss RV Troussova or Kafka Fragments would have made better companion pieces. Requiem: Songs for Sue - a tender setting of four poems by Emily Dickinson, Antonio Machado, Auden and Rilke scored for an autumnal pallette of low woodwind, strings and percussion - is the kind of song-cycle all young composers should study: sympathetically written for the singer - and, therefore, the audience - and sensitive in its translation of the eddying rhythms, colours, and pitches of the poetry.

Behold the Sun, by contrast, makes one of the most basic mistakes known to musical man, which is to assume that hysteria - here that of a teenage Anabaptist "in a chiliastic fury", no less - is best expressed at a hysterical pitch. Honestly, the whole piece would have worked better transposed down a fifth. Unsurprisingly, Claire Booth's bright, intelligent soprano blossomed in the Knussen and grated in the punishing glare of the Goehr.

No grating in Sir John Eliot Gardiner's stately performance of Die Jahreszeiten with the Monteverdi Choir and the English Baroque Soloists at the Barbican last Sunday, but little blossoming. Haydn's second great oratorio is a bucolic spectacular, filled with delicious music for birds, bees, thunderstorms and heat hazes, yet except for the magical playing of principal oboist Michael Niesemann, this was curiously joyless event. As impeccable as the singers of the Monteverdi Choir are in their blend, intonation, attack, diction, First Lady jackets and Finishing School deportment, I do wish they would let their hair down a little. Never have drunken peasants sounded so polite.

a.picard@independent.co.uk

'The Tempest', Royal Opera House (020 7304 4000) to 26 March