With all its musical, dramatic, and often technical demands, opera is one of the toughest art forms to get right. With so much at stake – and don’t forget the box office! – no wonder programmers feel the pressure to play bankable and safe. It’s therefore doubly satisfying when something unfamiliar comes along that ticks few of the ‘guaranteed’ boxes yet emerges as a satisfying artistic whole. That is certainly the case with this intelligent, eye-popping Opera Australia staging of a lesser masterpiece of the 1920s, served up to Sydneysiders in a musically sumptuous co-production with London’s Royal Opera House and supported by the Sydney Festival.

^{Dominica Matthews as Deaconess, Saimir Pirgu as Shepherd, Gennadi Dubinsky as Archiereios, Lorina Gore as Roxana and the Opera Australia Chorus. Photos by Keith Saunders}

In some ways, Karol Szymanowski’s operatic masterpiece King Roger (or Król Roger in its native Polish) is a typical product of its time. Lush and exotic, with pungent musical modes and a sense of the otherness of distant cultures, it shares a fascination for ‘the East’ with the works of Franz Schreker, or even Puccini’s Turandot. If that’s where the...