After Zarastrutha, Apollo and Dionysus. I think somebody got carried away.

King Roger     Thomas Hampson
Roxana         Elzbieta Szmytka
Edrisi         Philip Langridge
Shepherd       Ryszard Minkiewicz
Archbishop     Robert Gierlach
Deaconess      Jadwiga Rappe

Conductor      Simon Rattle

City of Birmingham Symphony Chorus and Youth Chorus
City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra

I have to admit, this performance of Szymonowski's King Roger left me
without much to say. The orchestra, choir and singers were all terrific,
delivering the music (somewhere between Strauss and Janacek) beautifully.
Thomas Hampson was authoritative, noble even, as the Norman king of Sicily
faced with a Christ-like stranger, a shepherd preaching love who turns out
to be the god Dionysus. Ryszard Minkiewicz looked too pale and interesting,
but sounded entrancing as the shepherd, Elzbieta Szmytka was austerely
passionate as Roxana, Roger's queen, who falls under the shepherd's spell
and urges him to do the same, and Philip Langridge was fine, as ever, as
Edrisi, Roger's open-minded rational adviser.

What happens in King Roger, I think, is a kind of allegory of how the
audience can respond to the emotional danger or power in a theatrical
performance, especially opera, and this makes the experience somehow
self-consuming. Roger first resists the stranger, accepting conventional
values, then tries to control his charisma by inviting him to a trial. But
the trial goes wrong, Roger's wife, embodying emotion, leaves with the
shepherd and the rest of the people, and Roger has to follow him to a
ruined theatre. In the final scene, Roger and Roxana build a sacrificial
fire to the stranger, revealed as Dionysus. Roxana disappears with him, but
Roger turns to face the sun and the future, having undergone a rather
drastic catharsis in the loss of his wife.

It's all very mysterious, in a positive sense. In a way, it's Tennysonian
romance, using massive and elaborate but lyrical resources for a grand
effect. But the specific historical setting reminded me also of Cavafy's
evocation of the numinous in the dark edges around Byzantium.

At any rate, a very rewarding eighty minutes.