Opera Review: King Roger

Published on Tuesday 26 August 2008 19:43

KING ROGER **** EDINBURGH FESTIVAL THEATRE

MENTION the name Karl Szymanowski and often the reaction is this: ah yes, didn't he write the opera King Roger? Yet how many of us have heard, never mind seen, this extraordinary work with its heavily perfumed score and deep-rooted Nietzschean plot?

Festival audiences have the golden opportunity to do just that this week in a striking production, originally staged by director Mariusz Trelinski in Poland by Opera Wroclawska, but presented here in Edinburgh by the wonderful Mariinsky Opera Company, not least its spellbinding orchestra.

The staging is subtly updated, replacing the stately Sicilian Byzantine church of the opening scene with something more convincingly austere and modernist. Brilliant lighting effects and an imaginative use of projected film and image provide a strangely surreal backdrop to the opera's trilogy of tableaux, amplifying the progressing mental tussle between the dark and institutionally protected King Roger with his alter ego, the wild "heretic" Shepherd.

With a cast well-matched to the production's sharp definition – the mostly solid Andrzej as King Roger, a sensually-charged Elzbieta Szmytka as his enigmatic wife Roxana, Pavo Tolstoy cutting a brilliantly troublesome and Dionysian Shepherd, and Sergey Semishkur as the shady Royal sidekick Edrisi – the bare simplicity of the plot remains its unshakeable strength. Even the orgiastic Bacchanalia of act II, for all its ecstatic vigour, is sensitively woven in.

But the true guts of the opera are to be heard in the orchestra pit. For this is a work fundamentally driven by a score that is its fulminating nerve centre. Under Valery Gergiev's highly sensitised direction, the luxurious instrumental forces (and seated chorus) deliver a passionate, organic musical embodiment of the psychological conflict. Close your eyes and you miss little.

Yet this production is a glowing triumph of the visual and aural. In mounting it, the Festival has opened our eyes to a 20th-century masterpiece.

Final performance tonight, 7:15pm