An unforgettable staging
Is riveted by Barrie Kosky’s production of at the Edinburgh International Festival
Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin is now such a staple of the repertory that it astonishes me to recall that when I began opera-going, it was still a rarity – the first production at Covent Garden in living memory didn’t materialise until 1971. I love it to bits, as much for its distinctively Russian melodic flavour as for its truthful exploration of the ironies of human feelings and behaviour. Over the years I have admired and endured many interpretations – productions by Graham Vick and Dmitri Tcherniakov stand out, and memories of Ileana Cotrubaș and Thomas Allen in that 1971 Peter Hall version are proving indelible.
I don’t think I’ll readily forget this superb staging imported to Edinburgh from Berlin’s Komische Oper either. It kept me sharply moved and alertly enthralled throughout – only a month after a rather duff do of it at the Buxton Festival left me wondering whether I wasn’t reaching the end of my enthusiasm.
It is directed by Barrie Kosky, whose work varies from the brilliantly imaginative ( Saul at Glyndebourne) to the perversely gimmicky ( Carmen at Covent Garden). Here his intervention has been relatively restrained: be reassured, this isn’t a hatchet job.
Setting the opera in a glade in the forest on the Larin estate, he freely evokes the early 20th century – this is Chekhov country, one might say. Out here, on a thick carpet of grass surrounded by fir trees, Tatyana writes her fateful letter, and her birthday party and the duel between Onegin and Lensky take place. There are no serfs, only rural gentry, enjoying badminton and a summer picnic. For the first scene of the final act, an icily grand St Petersburg salon is constructed like a pavilion in the middle of the stage; it is dismantled for the denouement, leaving Onegin and Tatyana out in the rain, emotionally exposed and back where they started. As designed by Rebecca Ringst and lit by Franck Evin, this is a potent image.
Kosky directs with a fine eye for detail, from the jam-making in the opening idyll to the vicious slap that Lensky delivers Olga before he reels drunkenly out of the birthday party. But the focus is on the journey of Tatyana, presented here in a performance of extraordinary intensity by the Lithuanian soprano Asmik Grigorian. Her voice has wine-dark plangency, produced in marvellously even and expressive tone, but her genius doesn’t lie only in the quality of her singing – seldom have I seen the poignancy of adolescent infatuation, its agonies and uncertainties, so sensitively conveyed. This love hurts: a pain like no other.
In contrast, Günter Papendell’s squarely sung Onegin seems merely pallid and brutish – a boisterous solipsistic townie who can’t feel anything until life teaches him some hard lessons. Did Kosky intend him to come across quite so unsympathetically, or is this the effect of Papendell’s manner? His mate Lensky doesn’t seem much of a poet either – their friendship is blokeish. But Oleksiy Palchykov delivers his melancholy aria with great refinement Onegin and elegance. The Komische Oper is celebrated for its crop of singing actors, and Karolina Gumos (Olga), Liliana Nikiteanu (Madam Larina), Margarita Nekrasova (Filipyevna), Dimitry Ivashchenko (Gremin) and Triquet (Christoph Späth) live up to its reputation.
The chorus is superb too: no ham or stock gestures, every member a credible individual.
This is an opera that can be conducted velvet-smooth or ripped open to leave its rough edges and ambivalences exposed. The Latvian Ainārs Rubiķis took the latter course with the excellent orchestra and, despite a few lapses in ensemble, reaped exciting rewards and kept the singers on their toes. Colours were vivid, the tension never slackened.
But it was Grigorian’s night, and the audience duly thundered her an enormous ovation. In recent years, she has been making a great name for herself at Salzburg, and last month she sang in Janáček’s Glagolitic Mass for the opening concert of the BBC Proms. Bagging her for Edinburgh before she makes her Covent Garden debut next season in the title role of Jenůfa is a great coup for the festival’s director, Fergus Linehan, whose programming of opera and classical music is showing remarkable flair and acumen.