Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky - Eugene Onegin / Fleming, Hvorostovsky, Vargas, Gergiev, Carsen [Metropolitan Opera 2007] [DVD]

I have just seen this performance on Sky Artsworld HD in the Monday night Metropolitan Opera series. I was completely taken aback by the exceptional quality of all aspects of this production and the revelatory account of the music. Onegin is a notoriously difficult piece to bring off. Tatyana's famous Letter Scene, being so self-contained, has, somewhat unfairly, come to represent the whole opera. Lensky's aria has also frequently appeared out of context. However, a great performance will manage the ebb and flow of both the highpoints and the through-composed sections with equal power and beauty.
One major problem is having an eponymous hero who, while ostensibly honourable, is also unsympathetic, arrogant, cynical and callous. Perhaps the opera would have been better entitled 'Tatyana', since there is little doubt that Tchaikovsky identifies totally with her point of view, giving her some of the most painfully beautiful and impassioned music he ever wrote.
A really successful production has to negotiate these difficulties so that the piece does not appear episodic and has a clear emotional trajectory. Otherwise it can feel like 'Scenes from Russian Life' punctuated by a handful of hit numbers.
I would have to say that I have never seen or heard such a convincing production as this. It is overwhelming, and largely because of the extraordinary performances of the lead singers, Fleming, Hvorostovksy and Vargas. Not only are they technically superb, but they sing and act with such power and feeling that you cannot fail to be drawn into the drama. Fleming is not a young woman, but she conveys the confusion of Tatyana's innocent passion with amazing and total conviction, revisiting it superbly in the last scene. Hvorostovsky has the looks, the bearing and the voice to convey Onegin's coolness, and he manages to make the rather awkward role reversal at the end very believable. I have not seen the name of Ramon Vargas for many a year, but he turns in a thoroughly engaging Lensky, persuading us, without a hint of youthful petulance, of the deep betrayal and insult he feels Onegin has subjected him to and which prompts his reckless challenge to a duel.
The production is often visually and dramatically inspired, for example in the lovely opening scene, with its warm carpet of leaves, in the chill of the silhouetted duel scene and in the superb transformation as the sun rises into the Gremin household.
Having had some doubts of late about Gergiev's excessive workload and ubiquity, although recent LSO concerts have featured some superb individual items, this Onegin was masterful. I cannot imagine a more impassioned or beautiful performance. Gergiev is criticised at times for sloppiness and under-rehearsal, but you would forgive him everything for this one, revelatory performance.
Immediately after seeing the broadcast, I was scouring the internet in desperation. I found nothing on my usual sources, but my joy was unalloyed when I discovered that the Met website is announcing a mid-December release on Decca. This was severely tempered by subsequently noting that the american release is NTSC and that we shall not be getting a PAL release here until February. I am unable to record the sound of gnashing teeth in this frustrated household, but if Amazon UK had this in stock today, it would be on its way to me right now. How can we bear to wait so long for this absolutely must-have DVD?.

This is a quite lovely DVD that rightly places Onegin at the heart of the opera, when frequently the whole focus is on Tatiana. While the latter is understandable given the importance of the Letter Scene to the drama of the work - and it was the musical kernel around which the recurring motifs of the opera are based - by focussing so centrally on Onegin himself the final scenes pack a real punch.

The staging is minimalist, the action taking place within the huge white cube of the bare Metropolitan stage, with no scenery. The different scenes are picked out by the simple use of a few judicious pieces of stage furniture - a single table for the opening scene in the Larin's garden, a bed and bureau for Tatiana's room and so on - and the use of sometimes quite sumptuous costumes. This gives the whole production a powerful simplicity and directness, and focuses attention on the musical performance of the orchestra and singers. The whole meaning of the opera has to be carried by the main characters' acting ability - which is hugely impressive.

The focus on Onegin begins with the overture. In one of those exquisite images that occur throughout this production, Onegin appears alone and somehow quite small in a spot lit chair, on an empty stage covered with autumnal leaves, wistfully reading an old letter. The air is suddenly filled with a shower of dead leaves: a beautiful and evocative start brilliantly setting out the nostalgic regret that so powerfully drives Onegin's actions in the final scenes. The leaves will cover the stage throughout the first act.

Renée Fleming is hardly the adolescent of the libretto, but from the start has the distant air of a girl infatuated with the heroic world of the romantic novel and detached from the mundane realities of the life she actually leads. Her Letter Scene captures exceptionally well the impulsive ardour and mad impetuosity brought on by the encounter with Onegin. It's joyful to behold. And she embodies completely her transformed persona as a woman of substance and high social status at the end of the opera.

Dmitri Hvorostovsky is an unsurpassed Onegin. Vocally - like Fleming - he is on top form, and, like her, totally lives the full range of his character's development, from the suave, emotionally cold and patronisingly self-assured young land-owner (he will later refer self-critically to his self-righteous moralising of the innocent young Tatiana), to the anguished, semi-ostracised, troubled man on the edges of "society", aimless and depressed since killing his best friend. His acting in the role reversal in the last scenes of the opera, with his almost adolescent love-struck look as he is introduced to the new Tatiana, and the repeat of Tatiana's Letter Scene melody - with variations on many of the same words - is completely believable and, I found, deeply moving. And here was a revelation for me. I have always thought of "Eugene Onegin" as an opera with not much action that simply ends with the surviving characters just older, wiser and sadder. Whilst in some ways that's still true, the sheer passionate desperation of both Onegin and Tatiana, clinging to each other almost in ecstasy in the final scene, carries a dramatic weight and intense emotional but unfulfillable desire that is painful to watch, gut-wrenching, and leaves us bereft for Onegin, finally left alone on his spot lit chair, in the middle of the empty stage. The narrative has turned full circle.

Within the apparently simplest of stagings some nice touches and a sensitive use of lighting changes cleverly pick out resonant details. Minimalism at the Met is a new experience for me - and a welcome one. The sometimes obsessive attention to 'authenticity' and tradition at the Met can lead to productions that are fusty, dull and look more like museum pieces than a living operatic tradition. Producer Robert Carsen knows how to get the greatest meaning out of the simplest gesture or apposite stage image. The mismatched chairs penning the guests into a just-too-small dance floor at Tatiana's birthday ball, for instance, suggest a certain "genteel poverty" in the Larin household, and a certain provincialism in the women's dresses (Onegin later refers to Tatiana's "humble background which I scorned", in the back of beyond) and possibly the imprisoning constraints of a narrow "polite society". The duel is a masterpiece of economic stagecraft: on an entirely empty stage, all the protagonists dressed in sombre black, Onegin and Lenski reach out towards one another as though longing to re-connect and return to their earlier friendship, but unable to close the breach in their relationship. Perspective makes them appear physically close but emotionally and socially the breach is too wide because of the conventions of social "honour" that Lenski has invoked and that they are now obliged to follow inexorably, despite their wishes. The death of Lenski and Onegin's dismay at what he has done is enacted in silhouette. (I have little sympathy for the character of Lenski, but Ramón Vargas sings his great aria with real beauty and anxious emotion - drawing enthusiastic and extended applause from the Met audience. And the production does strongly suggest that Onegin *could have* defused the situation at the ball, but didn't.) The immediate transition to a St Petersburg ballroom, with Onegin centre stage being dressed in formal attire by six domestic servants during the Polonaise is a brilliant idea, emphasising the artifice behind "society" and the true status of Onegin within that world, and allowing for a seamless shift to Act III and Onegin's disaffected narrative.

This is a magnificent DVD. Gergiev gets sumptuous playing, emotional, nuanced and finely detailed from the Met Orchestra - particularly, for me, the woodwind which Tchaikovsky uses so tellingly to contribute so much to the beauty and emotion of this score. (The bonuses include a brief but fascinating piece on Gergiev rehearsing this production.) In addition to the leading roles, all the smaller parts are taken exceptionally well. Special praise must go to Svetlana Volkova as Madame Larina, who sets the tone of a woman's fate in this culture: "Heaven gave us habit in place of happinness", a moto that will apply to her daughter too; Elena Zaremba for an engaging Olga; Larissa Shevchenko, an especially touching Filippyevna, salt of the earth as Tatiana's old nurse; and Sergei Aleksashkin, who delivers a powerful, resonant and affecting aria as Prince Gremin. There are optional subtitles in English, French, German, Italian, Spanish and Chinese.

This is an exceptionally strong "Onegin" - my favourite on DVD by some way - in a deceptively "simple" staging, beautifully directed for film by the late, great Brian Large. This is near enough a definitive production of Onegin, one that will be difficult to improve on (except for those who need a more traditional staging) and I strongly recommend it.

I received my DVD of Eugene Onegin (filmed live at the New York Metropolitan Opera) about a week ago and already have played it at least 4 times. The whole opera is carried along by the beautiful melodic music, including of course the uplifting waltz and the exuberant Polonaise. Sung in Russian it has subtitles in English, French, German, Italian, Spanish and Chinese.
Russian baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky is suitably suave and arrogant as Onegin. American soprano Renée Fleming is a very pretty and effective Tatiana and Mexican tenor Ramón Vargas is in good strong voice as Lenski (I kept being reminded of his singing as Don Carlos from Vienna 2004).
Russian Valery Gergiev conducts the Met Opera Orchestra very artistically without a baton and with excellent control. My only quibble is that the English subtitles suffer from American spelling. Apart from that it is spell binding. All that unrequited love.... Over 2 hours long and it seems to pass in minutes! Very highly recommended.