Intermezzo

Eugene Onegin yet again

 Eugene Onegin - Royal Academy of Music, 14 March 2013

And so on to the - fourth? fifth? - Eugene Onegin in London in the last five minutes. This one's distinguishing characteristic was that the principals were roughly the same age as the characters they played. Even though the opera's first-ever performance was given by Moscow Conservatory pupils, it's still an ambitious choice for a student production, but the RAM largely rose to the challenge.

John Ramster's functional period production delivered exactly what the evening required. Short on scenery, long on lavish and predictable costumery, it showcased the singing talent without the distractions of interpretive novelty. This was a well-prepared and intelligently-cast show.

Keenlyside passes Russian test

Intermezzo's Russian spy reports back from last night's Eugene Onegin that every single performer managed well with the language, often a stumbling block for non-native speakers.

Elena Maximova (Olga), the only Russian in the Royal Opera House cast, received the only perfect score. All the others revealed accents of various origins, though, to the surprise of my spy, there were no mistakes whatsoever, and every word came across clearly. A frequent operagoer, she said she was "amazed" they'd done so well, particularly when she learned that Simon Keenlyside doesn't speak the language at all.

The well-deserved applause video above is from Saturday night's show - thanks to Kyoko.

Eugene Onegin, Opera Holland Park

Yevgeny Onegin - Opera Holland Park, 13 July 2012

Proof that opera companies never talk to each other. With recent stagings by English Touring Opera (conventional but revelatory) and ENO (best forgotten) cutting into each other's audiences, Eugene Onegin is the opera of the year. Now Opera Holland Park enter the fray.

Cowboy Onegin hits the internets

On Saturday 24 March the Bavarian State Opera are streaming Eugene Onegin live.

The infamous 2008 'Brokeback Mountain' production by Krzysztof Warlikowski imagines Onegin and Lensky as lovers. Much shirtlessness ensues.

And who better to pop those buttons than Simon Keenlyside and Pavol Breslik? They're joined by Ekaterina Scherbachenko, and Pietari Inkinen conducts.

Streaming begins at 7pm CET (6pm UK),  and it's a once-only, live event.

This is the original 2008 trailer, with an earlier cast: 

 

English Touring Opera's Eugene Onegin

Eugene Onegin - English Touring Opera - Hackney Empire, 9 March 2012

You don't need a load of fancy scenery to tell a story, as English Touring Opera's minimal but effective staging proves. First seen in 2007, James Conway's production employs little more than a large panel in the middle. Lit by turns as window, mirror and screen, it conjures up orchard and ballroom with surprising ease. Lavish period costumes provide eye candy for the sweet-toothed.

Where Deborah Warner's recent ENO Onegin started to go wrong was in creating vast, empty spaces in which to play out the opera's intimate drama. Here, everything is restored to its proper, human scale.  Singing it in English only enhances that.

Onegin at ENO

Eugene Onegin - English National Opera, 23 November 2011

What a dull evening Deborah Warner has managed to make from this opera of almost infinite interpretive possibilities. 

Unwilling to risk any sort of perspective, she's fallen back on a lavishly decorated blend of BBC bonnet drama and dinosaur-age Met fare (no surprise that's where it's ultimately headed). None of the parts are drawn strongly enough to call it character-driven either.  A brand new production, it already has the look of an under-rehearsed revival.  Edward Gardner's exquisitely calibrated but dispassionate conducting just reinforced the sense of intellectual and emotional detachment.

Stefan Herheim's Amsterdam Eugene Onegin - full video

If the video above doesn't work for you, try the source here. The opera itself is preceded by a short background documentary.

(Note - verbinden met videoserver mislukt means 'failed to connect to videoserver'. If you get this message leave it a couple of minutes and it may connect. If not, try the Flash option.)

(With huge thanks to reader Laura for the tip).

Eugene Onegin in Amsterdam

Eugene Onegin - De Nederlandse Opera, Het Muziektheater Amsterdam, 18 June 2011

By telling the story largely in interactive flashback, Stefan Herheim's new production ingeniously restores elements of Pushkin's verse novel absent from Tchaikovsky's adaptation. Flitting between Pushkin's time and today, Onegin and Tatiana take turns to contemplate their past.  At the same time, modern Russia's identity crisis is explored via a procession of national stereotypes from peasant to patriarchs, communists to cosmonauts. This feels over-ambitious, though to be fair it is truthful to the novel, which is drawn on a larger scale than the opera. The production as a whole though is still an extraordinary theatrical experience, enhanced by the brilliant playing of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra.

Stefan Herheim's new Onegin in Amsterdam - the photos

 

Eugene Onegin opened last night at De Nederlandse Opera in Amsterdam, in a new production by Stefan Herheim.

The Dutch have really pulled out all the stops for this. The orchestra is the Royal Concertgebouw, and it's conducted by Mariss Jansons. The cast includes Bo Skovhus as Onegin, Krassimira Stoyanova as Tatiana, Elena Maximova as Olga, Andrej Dunaev as Lensky and Mikhail Petrenko as Gremin.

More later - meanwhile here are some production photos (Forster/De Nederlandse Opera).

Royal Opera House Summer Season 2010

And so 2009/10 draws to a close with the usual tourist-friendly summer fare from the Royal Opera House.

The highlight (especially since he had to cancel Tamerlano) is Plácido Domingo's appearance in and as Simon Boccanegra (29 June to 15 July). We've all found out by now that he's not exactly a perfect fit - but then these days, who is? And it might be his last appearance at Covent Garden. And WTF he's Plácido Domingo. That's enough to make it essential. A cast that includes Marina Poplavskaya, Ferruccio Furlanetto and Joseph Calleja with Maestro Pappano himself conducting should compensate for Elijah Moshinsky's tired production.

Running it close is a new Laurent Pelly production of Massenet's Manon (22 June to 2 July) with Anna Netrebko in the title role. Pappano conducts again, and gorgeous Vittorio Grigolo makes his Covent Garden debut.

David McVicar's slightly fussy but intelligent Le Nozze di Figaro (31 May to 17 June) makes a swift return, with Erwin Schrott and a delightful springer spaniel vying for the cuteness award. As if that's not enough, Sir Colin Davis conducts most dates, making it a must-see.

Another McVicar, Salome (3 July to 16 July), has its first revival, with Angela Denoke in the title role and Hartmut Haenchen conducting. "Contains scenes of nudity and violence" - but not where you'd think.

Angela Gheorghiu lovers will be flocking to La Traviata (8 July to 17 July), though it may be James Valenti and Zeljko Lucic who make it worth seeing. Richard Eyre's production is a fine and thoughtful one, though anyone who catches it in May with Ermonela Jaho doesn't really need to see it again.

A swift resuscitation of Francesca Zambello's godawful Carmen (5 June to 26 June) has little to recommend it this time round apart from perhaps Christine Rice in the title role.

In the Linbury Studio, George Benjamin's Into the Little Hill (23 July to 26 July), here coupled with Berio's Recital I, comes highly recommended.

The Bolshoi visit in August, with a critically-acclaimed production of Eugene Onegin the only opera amidst endless nights of ballet (which to be honest, is probably a safer bet).

Friends' booking opens on 3 March and general booking on 6 April.

Bolshoi summer visit to Covent Garden

After the Mariinsky's Ring cycle last summer, it's the Bolshoi's turn to wave the Russian flag at the Royal Opera House in August 2010.

Most of their stay will be given over to ballet, with just one opera, Eugene Onegin, on offer. Judging from previous Bolshoi visits, it may just demonstrate why the company is better known for dance, but at least there'll be the opportunity to catch 2009 Cardiff Singer of the World winner Ekaterina Scherbachenko as Tatyana (possibly in alternation with Tatiana Monogarova, it's not quite clear).

Dmitri Tcherniakov's 2006 production upset traditionalists in Moscow on its first airing, but has been highly praised in some quarters, so who knows.

Booking opens on 2 March for Friends and 6 April for everyone else. Tickets are a lot cheaper than the ROH's own, with a top price of £135.

 

Here's an extract feauturing Vladislav Sulimsky and Ekaterina Scherbachenko:

Daniel Barenboim rehearses Onegin with Rolando Villazon

Part of French TV channel ARTE's '24 hours in Berlin' programme broadcast on Saturday.

Daniel Barenboim is chauffeured to the Lindenoper where he smokes a cigar, tells a joke, rehearses Achim Freyer's perplexing Eugene Onegin with Rolando Villazon, speaks four languages fluently, etc, etc.....

Night of the Juggalo Zombies - Rolando Villazon in new Berlin Eugene Onegin

Eugene Onegin - Staatsoper Unter den Linden, Berlin, 27 September 2008

 
production photos: Monika Rittershaus; curtain call photos: intermezzo.typepad.com

Who is Eugene Onegin all about? Onegin or Tatyana? That's the question usually asked. Director Achim Freyer seems to think it's all about himself. Ignoring the demands of the story and the music, he's simply slotted his new Berlin Staatsoper production into his familiar style of puppety characters, painterly sets and disengaged movement. This abnormal level of stylisation and artificiality may enhance a Zauberflote, but it's a treatment that reveals little about the down-to-earth and richly characterised Eugene Onegin. Indeed if you watched the whole thing with your fingers in your ears, you'd be hard pressed to guess what opera was in front of you.

There's a bargain-basement look (what funding crisis?)to the bare stage, sheeted in white for the first two acts, whipped away to reveal glossy black for the last. The costumes were my favourite part of the design concept - anonymous black garments rolled in whitewash that suggest uniformity but also snow and dusty decay.

Freyer has the whole cast on the steeply-raked stage most of the time, made-up like an Insane Clown Posse vid, shuffling up and down and across in a series of extended painful-looking zombie movements, a sort of barking mad dance. Chairs are wielded, waved, sometimes even sat on, a substitute for any human contact. 

The whole extended sequence is repeated four and a half times over the three hours - yes, there's a reason why all the production photos seem to look the same. (Once I twigged this, three reps in, I felt enormously clever - until I realised it had taken me two hours to grasp it). The occasional brief respites, like the hundreds of red ping pong balls that cascade down the stage as Onegin rejects Tatyana, are too crudely executed to provoke anything except embarrassed giggles.

Of course this all means that the action doesn't fit the situation, but that's Freyer's point. Life is a series of endlessly repeating loops, without meaning; everything is governed by fate.

Now to be fair, that's a perspective that could be validly drawn from Onegin. But it's far from the only one. And it certainly doesn't bear non-stop exploration to the exclusion of everything else in the opera. Tchaikowsky allows his characters thoughts and actions, with consequences, but Freyer's too busy taking three hours to make one simple point to investigate anything else. As the second act heckler (incidentally young and normal-looking) shouted, "Freyer is boring".

This production isn't half as clever or beautiful as it thinks it is, just rather silly. But in an honest, childlike way, not a manipulative or irritating one. And its chilly detachment does at least avoid the gasping and clutching and cloying sentimentality of many conventional interpretations. In short, it gives the music room to breathe.

Daniel Barenboim's reading was predictably muscular and confident, fortuitously matched to the production. He raced brusquely through the crowd scenes as if he'd rather leave them out altogether, and he certainly left the chorus behind at a few points. For the soloists he was attentive and sympathetic, moulding the orchestra around them, creating the characterisations that the production concept denied. Only the dramatically lingering finale had the least hint of sentimentality.

Rolando Villazón was someone else who positively benefited from the production. The constrained movement encouraged rather anonymous vocalising from many in the cast. Rolando's Lensky moved like a zombie but he sounded like a living, breathing person, full of fire and passion, and his physical stillness focussed and intensified his energy.

He sang in a less (technically) 'open' way than he had in Don Carlo at Covent Garden. But the upside was a voice that sounded totally under his control, with never a hint of strain or cracking. The highest notes pushed him to his limits, but again it was controlled, with just the occasional dip off pitch. On stage for the whole time, often in weird contorted poses, he must have been in some physical discomfort (if not real pain) by the end, but this never found its way into his singing.

If he wasn't already a star, a performance like this would make him one - was that why Freyer placed him centre stage, at the heart of the action? - if there's one character Onegin is not 'about', it's Lensky, after all. Villazón fans could hardly complain about either the quality or the quantity of Rolando on show.

Rene Pape's Gremin was as dignified as his clown makeup allowed him to be, though the chill of the production seemed to have worked its way into his bones. Fine singing, but missing that final degree of commitment.

Beside these two, the other singers largely faded into the background. Roman Trekel sang Onegin competently enough, but if you didn't know the opera was titled Eugene Onegin, you'd never guess from his retiring performance.

Anna Samuil was altogether too detached to be engaging, and brought little sense of Tatyana's emotional development to the final act.

Margarita Nekrasova, a sturdy and imposing Nurse, was the most impressive amongst the smaller roles and Stephan Rügamer's Triquet was nicely sung.

At the end, the boos for Freyer at the end predictably drowned out the applause. The earlier heckler wasn't bored enough to leave - he hung around to add his voice to the masses. It was touching to see both Rolando Villazón and Daniel Barenboim grasp the elderly director's arm in a gesture of solidarity. But I predict with confidence that this production won't be joining Berlin's repertory staples.

The full official photo gallery is here, there are some more press pictures here, and some more curtain call shots below - captioned because you'll need it..... 

 

 

Rolando Villazón and Anna Samuil: 

 

Rolando Villazón, Maria Gortsevkaya (Olga) and Margarita Nekrasova:

 

Rolando Villazón:

 

 

 

Rene Pape and Roman Trekel:

 

 

Rene Pape:

 

Rolando Villazón and Daniel Barenboim - comparing injuries?:

 

 

 

 

 

Rene Pape's bid for Blobbydom

Mr Blobby in 1993:

Rene Pape in last night's Berlin Staatsoper premiere of Eugene Onegin:

 

and here's teh Papester in action (photo: Monika Rittershaus):

Rolando Villazon Pandacam !!

 

Live from Berlin !! well, live-ish.

Yup, in Achim Freyer's new, minimalist production of Eugen Onegin for the Staatsoper which premiered tonight in front of teh Merkin, the only thing there was plenty of was panstik. And trowels, I venture.

Rolando was on stage for the whole three hours, more or less. Centre stage! Even after he died! It was that sort of show. Anyone who'd gone just to see Rolando could hardly feel short-changed.

Though it looked like the director had taken all the money for the sets and spent it on mind-bending drugs instead, it actually wasn't too bad, in a Nightmare Before Christmas sort of a way. Not distracting, not irritating, just a little silly (though inevitably it got as many boos as cheers, and even a mid-show heckler).

Rolando's Lensky pretty much pwned it, adding a vital human touch amidst the slo-mo zombie posturing of the Konzept. Rene Pape made a late bid for the top spot with his splendid Gremin, but it's hard to be noble in Mr Blobby makeup.

The path was clear for Daniel Barenboim to grab that unoccupied audience attention and make the orchestra the centre of the opera. Perhaps that was the idea all along.......?

More, much more, tomorrow..........

Eugene Onegin at Covent Garden - the forecast is cold and wet

Eugene Onegin - Royal Opera House, 8 March 2008

Marina Poplavskaya, now 30, has been singing the part of Tatyana since she was 18. And she's Russian. Not a difficult casting choice, then. This is her biggest Covent Garden role to date -- unfortunately framed in a dull, uninspired production. First seen in 2006, but looking more like a '70's relic, or the Met on a budget, its period setting is dominated by bare minty walls and the main novelty, a Vegas-scaled water feature. This massive puddle nearly fills the first act stage, pushing the action out to a thin strip at the front of the stage and a tired-looking grassy knoll at the rear. Tatyana's mid-act letter scene is accommodated by a hut-like bedroom, which has to be ludicrously manhandled out of the 'river'.

Scrim-projected paintings open each act  (for the first, Jeune Homme Nu Assis au Bord de la Mer by Hippolyte Flandrin, left). They connect tenuously with the action, and indeed with Tchaikowsky's own life but, crucially, they don't help tell the story, and their dreamy repose jars horribly with the austere sets and the contrastingly lavish and lurid costumery.

Tatyana's dream scene at the start of the second act is almost brushed over as it melds confusingly with the following ball scene, animal-masked apparitions seemingly becoming part of the later celebrations.

But this is perhaps the most attractive part of the production, thanks to the beautiful and detailed costumes, like a Berwick Street haberdasher's window with their authentically Russian bold colour palette. The problem here was that the large crowd clustered into the compressed space sometimes obscured the real action. The snowy wastes of the following duel scene worked better in all respects.

The water feature is trotted out again for the final act, only this time it is frozen over and packed with skaters. Opera on Ice!  Complete with back-projections of olde St Petersburg. Although this created some symmetry with the first act and successfully points out how youth, with all its possibilities, has given way to the rigid strictures of age, etc etc, its main effect is simply to get in the way, again. There was also, curiously, no sense of the passage of time, of the fact that this act takes place some years later than the first.

The only unqualified success of the production concept is its generosity to the singers, who for the most part perform standing up and facing forward at the front of the stage, so nothing gets lost. And as it's strongly cast, from top to bottom, the vocal performances became the highlight of the day.

Marina Poplavskaya has enormous presence, and she made a commanding Tatyana. The unrelenting steely power of her voice was most effective in the drama of her final confrontation with Onegin. Doubt and vulnerability seem to come less naturally, but she is enough of an actor to convey something of Tatyana's shy bookishness in her physical performance.

Gerald Finley's solid Onegin provided the warmth in this coupling. His suavity on the initial encounter with Tatyana wasn't fettered by condescension, and his desperation and passion were plain to see in the finale. He faltered a little in the duel scene,

Piotr Beczala, with his clear, flexible tenor, conveyed Lensky's ardour and impetuosity well, and he captured something of the self-regarding nature of Lensky's 'poetic soul'. Ekaterina Semenchuk (ex-wedding singer made good), despite a richly-coloured and exceptionally controlled vocal performance, somehow failed to make any clear impression as Olga.

Diana Montague's Larina and Elizabeth Sikora's Filipievna were both excellent, elevating the opening scene to a convincing exploration of memory and regret. Brindley Sherratt, playing Gremin (Hans-Peter König takes over for the rest of the run), balanced authority and pathos beautifully. In the small part of Zaretsky, Vuyani Mlinde made a strong impression. Robin Leggate's campissimo Monsieur Triquet seemed to have wandered in from a different production (Gilbert & Sullivan en français?), but he provided some superbly comic relief.

In line with the general tone of the production, conductor Jirí Belohlávek gave a rather safe and uninspired reading, but it was a cleaner performance than we sometimes get at the ROH, and his dynamics and pacing showed great consideration for singers.

As with last year's rather duff Fidelio, the Royal Opera House chose a weekend matinee for the opening performance. I count myself duly warned for the future.