Król Roger, Royal Opera House, review: 'a major triumph'

It’s taken nearly a century for Szymanowski’s opera – premièred in 1926 – to reach Covent Garden. It’s scarcely been staged in Britain before (there was a modestly mounted production in 1974 conducted by Charles Mackerras at Sadler’s Wells), with only a BBC Prom and a recording conducted by Simon Rattle to keep its flame burning in recent years.

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 Janacek 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. “My God is as beautiful as I am,” he seductively claims.

Despite resistance from the voices of order, Roger is unmanned too – his suppressed desires are disturbed. He 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.

^{The set of Krol Roger at the Royal Opera House (Image: Alastair Muir)}

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. Despite pleading a cold, 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 superfluous interruption of an interval, the writhing naked bodies that cornily represent Roger’s sub-conscious, 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.

Box office 020 7304 4000, www.roh.org.uk. Until 19 May