Thomas Adès' Powder her Face is now almost twenty years old, and the composer, now 42, has only strengthened his spell on audiences, organizers, and musicians. We have grown accustomed to trusting Mr. Adès to deliver works that are not only cleverly and soundly constructed, but also emotionally absorbing and rewarding in a way representative of the representative trends in music today. My neighbor at BAM warned me that this would not be The Tempest and that I should not expect to find maturity in the opera. Adès was in fact 24 when Powder her Face received its premiere at the Cheltenham Festival. As I looked and listened, the opera seemed a model of precocious maturity in comparison with the Pythonesque production it received from Jay Scheib, who is in fact Adès' senior by two years.