Szymanowski: King Roger

The first King Roger on DVD and Blu-ray! David Pountney’s visually powerful production provided the Bregenz Festival with one of the greatest successes of in the past few years.

It is hard to believe that Karol Szymanowski’s masterpiece of 1926, his opera King Roger, was for decades a shadowy existence, until it was freed from a deep sleep by Sir Simon Rattle, who Significance of the work: King Roger is one of the best operas of the 20th century. Szymanowski, the when a Pole growing up in the Ukraine later travelled frequently in the Orient, King Roger chose Roger as his symbolic figure for the vision of a musical, religious and philosophical bridge between Orient and Occident. The Three Acts of the opera form a triptych of cultures.