Far worse things happen to characters in other operas by Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, but “Eugene Onegin” sweeps the competition for its depiction of crippling interpersonal damage. By the time Ralph Fiennes directs it for Paris Opera later this year (his opera-directing debut), will the drama even be endurable? For now, we have Laurent Pelly’s production for Belgium’s La Monnaie in a new DVD from Naxos.
Pelly literally squares the circle with some geometric stagecraft that provides one degree of distance from the pain. The story plays out on a quadrangular raised platform which, with some overhead lighting, can be made to look circular. Playing spaces are empty and lack any sense of locales. Floors are blond wood, and, in accordance with current European directorial clichés, walls are as high as the sets themselves and completely unadorned.
In a note to this production, Pelly’s first Tchaikovsky, the director allows that his objective was to create an abstract space, to keep the focus on the characters and their isolation within themselves and from each other. The gamble doesn’t quite pay off. The sense of “frustration” that in his view accompanies all the characters’ experiences and expression of love gradually melts into a more ordinary kind of frustration from the audience.
Bleak climate
Tchaikovsky and his fellow librettist, Konstantin Shilvosky, based their story on Alexander Pushkin’s verse novel. The focus is on three characters, the aristocratic Onegin, his friend, Lensky, and Tatyana, a girl from a lower (but hardly low) class experiencing the exquisite pains of first love.
Only Lenski dies –onstage, not at the end but midway– the victim of Onegin’s bullet in an early-morning duel. But what cuts across class and gender boundaries is the isolation that suffocates everyone.
The plot is predictable (No one gets what they want), the psychological climate is bleak, and the tone vacillates between the adamant and the hopeless. Not a note in the score suggests that there will be a happy ending. A particularly Russian strain of doom hangs over everything. Passing beauties are bittersweet at best.
Reading romantic literature is the seed of Tatyana’s emotional trauma. Pelly puts an attractively bound volume in her eager, clutching hands, and she both loses herself in it and hides behind it. To get her attention, people have to peer over it. It’s the only element with a right to be wooden, though everyone has a turn with functional anonymity.
Pelly fields a cast of singers who know how to execute his direction; he’s blessed with a strong trio of principals, singing actors all of them. What they share is, for once, visible youth and young adulthood. As the dastardly Onegin, baritone Stephane Degout is made up to look much younger than usual. These are people tripped up by their inexperience.
Press send?
Pelly rightly sees Tatyana as the central character, despite the opera’s title, and Sally Matthews immerses herself in the assignment. Her Letter Scene is well enough sung but is nearly upstaged by her jittery, jiggly pubescence. Her big self-reflection is something like: press Send? She negotiates the character’s maturation convincingly, ultimately radiant in the conviction that fidelity trumps passion.
Onegin himself is a hard sell, the brutality of his cultivation always in view, an operatic villain who bursts out of the cliches to become a truly dangerous individual. Maybe because he himself is gay, Stephane Degout’s Onegin is unusually tender in his first response to Tatyana’s entreaty –essentially, Look elsewhere, young lady. This way lies ruin. The vocal performance is seductive, chilling, but otherwise all of a piece, and a broken, sharp piece it is.
Bogdan Volkov’s Lenski gets his dose of Onegin’s personal poison, which prompts a series of reflections on the fickleness of friendship and, staring down the barrel of his dear friend’s pistol, thoughts about impending death. The worse things get, the more Volkov digs in, singing gloriously at the climax.
The hero of this performance is conductor Alain Altinoglu, experienced in “Onegin” in exactly the way his cast is not, and the light guiding the production. From the jump, the beauty of Tchaikovsky’s orchestration is colored by the knowledge of where things are headed, and there’s hardly a note that does not have a tear hanging from it.
Condensations
Thomas Adès, as consummate a musician as walks among us, has made a series of suites based on his operas “Powder Her Face” and “The Tempest” and his ballet score, “Inferno,” composer-led performances of which make up the latest release from The London Philharmonic Orchestra on its house label.
“Powder Her Face,” a comedy about the British royals (which may never wholly shed the its reputation as the first opera to have an onstage blow job –in the libretto, not just a director’s fever dream), has been a success from the start and, because it’s chamber-sized, travels well, having notched up a string of performances around the world. Still, it’s gratifying to hear something like a highlights album.
“The Tempest” and “Inferno,” scores investigating Shakespeare and Dante, are far denser. Whether they profit from condensation is a question every listener will answer differently, but these suites augur to keep their larger selves on the boards, if only of the concert hall. The playing of the LPO is magical, and Adès conducts with his usual ice and fire.
Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, “Eugene Onegin,” La Monnaie, Alain Altinoglu, conductor, Laurent Pelly, director, Naxos Classical, https://www.naxos.com
Thomas Adès, opera and ballet suites, Thomas Adès conductor, London Philharmonic Orchestra, https://www.lpo.org.uk
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