TUESDAY June 13, 7:30 p.m. (finishing at approx 9:20 p.m.)
KING ROGER
(Król Roger)
An opera in three acts
by Karol Szymanowski (1882 – 1937)
Libretto by the composer and Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz (Szymanowski's cousin)
First performed in the Wielki Theatre, Warsaw on 19 June 1926
Cast
Production
A 2015 production from the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden
Direction by Kasper Holten
Design by Steffen Aarfing
Lighting design by John Clark
Choreography by Cathy Marston
The Royal Opera Chorus & Orchestra of the Royal Opera House
conducted by Antonio Pappano
Synopsis
Act One: Twelfth Century, Sicily
In the cathedral at Palermo, the priests ask King Roger to imprison an unknown Shepherd, who has proclaimed a philosophy of beauty and pleasure which they see as threatening Christianity.
The King is willing to comply, but his beloved wife Roxana begs him to hear the Shepherd before deciding.
Roger agrees, and invites the Shepherd to his castle.
Act Two
The Shepherd, who comes from India, enters the castle with a group of disciples.
They begin to dance. Roxana and the courtiers are won over by the Shepherd’s charismatic personality and teaching, and when he leaves they follow.
Act Three
In the ruins of an ancient theatre Roger searches for Roxana and the Shepherd. Soon they appear, and he follows them like a pilgrim. Suddenly the Shepherd becomes Dionysus and his disciples bacchantes and maenads. They dance ecstatically, and then depart with Roxana.
Roger remains alone, singing a hymn to the rising sun.
He has resisted a powerful temptation, and has thereby achieved wholeness.
NEXT MEETING: Tuesday, July 11, 7.30 pm
La Traviata
It has been called Verdi's most tuneful, most popular, and most moving work.
This production, from the Aix-en-Provence Festival of 2011, offers a spine-tingling performance from Natalie Dessay.
This really is one not to be missed.
Click here to watch the official Royal Opera House trailer for this production
... and here to watch the official Royal Opera House preview of Roxana's song
Mariusz Kwiecien as Roger
and Georgia Jarman as Roxana
The Telegraph reviews this production:
A major triumph
It’s taken nearly a century for Szymanowski’s opera to reach Covent Garden. But now, after this rapturously acclaimed performance, Król Roger’s power and stature are decisively vindicated, lifting it alongside Bluebeard’s Castle and the later works of Janáček as a masterpiece of the early twentieth-century European sensibility.
The drama is enthralling and, with a duration of ninety minutes, also blessedly concise. Its plot is simple, loosely drawn from Euripides’ The Bacchae and built on a sliver of medieval historical evidence.
Presiding over a society rigid with Christian orthodoxy, King Roger of Sicily is confronted by a nameless charismatic shepherd of rare physical allure who preaches a subversive gospel of love and pleasure. Roger and his wife Roxana are drawn to desert their court and worldly positions to follow the Shepherd, who now calls for them to abandon themselves to Dionysiac joy. But Roger finally sees beyond this mere sensuality and experiences a vision of something transcendently pantheistic.
Szymanowski imbues the music with a magnificent oriental archaism: the influence of his Hungarian neighbour Bartok may be salient, but the flavour is more voluptuously romantic than formally modernist. Much of the vocal writing is melismatic and incantatory, threaded through sumptuously coloured orchestral tapestries that shimmer and glow. Nothing in the score is more beautiful than the spectral nocturne that opens the final scene; nothing more exciting than the orgy than brings the second scene to its climax. Antonio Pappano’s conducting of its intensities is masterly, and the orchestra luxuriates in them.
All praise to the cast too. Mariusz Kwieicien, himself a Pole, is imposing and impassioned in the title-role, vividly conveying Roger’s anxiety about his sexual identity. Samir Pirgu is stretched to his limits by the Shepherd’s high-lying line, but grapples with it valiantly, while Georgia Jarman makes much of Roxana’s lovely arias of yielding and imploring. Renato Balsadonna’s chorus meets the challenge of much of the opera’s most original and complex music with total assurance.
And for once, there can be no substantial complaints about the production, directed with flair, clarity and intelligence by Kasper Holten. Steffen Aarfing’s setting of a tiered arena dominated by a massive sculpted head is enormously impressive, and the suggestion that Roger is Szymanowski himself is made without over-egging the homoerotic element.
One could quibble about the excessively busy video and the Shepherd’s white-and-gold garb that makes him look like something out of Kismet. But none of these miscalculations can detract from a major artistic triumph.
- Rupert Christiansen in The Telegraph, 2 May 2015