Reviews 2018
Reviews 2018
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by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Canadian Opera Company, Four Seasons Centre, Toronto
September 30-November 3, 2018
Tatyana: “How I love to dream when I hear these songs”
The Canadian Opera Company’s new production of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin directed by Robert Carsen is not only beautiful to look at but excels in the clarity of its storytelling. The production highlights the talent of Canadian singers in the lead roles and only requires a more passionate account of the score from conductor Johannes Debus to be an unqualified success.
Tchaikovsky wrote the opera in 1879 to his own libretto that closely follows certain passages from its source, the 1833 novel-in-verse of the same name by Alexander Pushkin. Onegin was the first in a long line of studies in Russian literature of the so-called “superfluous man” («лишний человек») – young men of wealth and privilege, disdainful of society and crushed by a boredom with life that they try to relieve through drink, gambling or manipulating people. Further examples are Lermontov’s A Hero for Our Time (1840), Turgenev’s The Diary of a Superfluous Man (1850), which gave its name to the concept, and Goncharov’s Oblomov (1859). While the point of view of society may come from a jaded member of it, Pushkin’s novel still provides a strong critique of the cruel, unforgiving social conventions of the day.
Contrasting with the starkness of the set are the huge number of attractive period costumes Levine has designed. Levine carefully dresses the chorus as the earth-coloured serfs who work on the Larin estate where Tatyana lives, then as the colourful country gentlefolk whom the Larins host at Tatyana’s name-day celebration and finally as the elegant black-clad nobility who attend the ball in Saint Petersburg in Act 3.
Very unlike so many current opera directors, Carsen chooses a concept for his production that illuminates the original story rather than wilfully forces it to tell an entirely different one. In Eugene Onegin, Carsen has imagined the opera as Onegin’s memory of past events. Alone on stage during the overture in a tight pool of light, Onegin opens a farewell letter from Tatyana out of which fall a few autumn leaves. Soon a torrent of leaves fall from above him, the circle of light widens and we see that the entire stage is covered in fallen leaves, autumn being the season when Onegin and Tatyana first met. Thus, Carsen and Levine both signal that memory has taken over the stage and visually establish the melancholy tone of the opera of a world moving physically and emotionally toward greater coldness. In the last scenes of the opera the leaves have disappeared and the stage is the bright white of winter.
Carsen’s most controversial intervention in the storytelling appears during the opera’s four famous dances. To signify the ballroom at Tatyana’s family home, Carsen merely sets rows of chairs in a square barely large enough to contain the size of the chorus or to give the dancers enough freedom to waltz. This may reflect the constraints of society but one does wish to see motion on stage that reflects the vitality of the music. More radically Carsen replaces dancing to the mazurka with people running offstage to another room to dance, while the mazurka’s wild rhythm seems to reflect the distress in the seated Lensky, who has challenged Onegin to a duel. The most radical choice is Carsen’s decision to use the polonaise that begins Act 3 not for a dance at all but to depict Onegin’s valets helping him out of his duelling clothes and into his evening wear for a ball. We understand the irony of using such a buoyant dance music such a mundane task, but it feels like a sad misuse of the music. Only with the écossaise of Act 3 does Carsen clear the dancing area to allow two professional dancers (Brett Andrew Taylor and Andrea Ciacci) to dominate the space with the movement that so imbues the music.
Carsen draws acting from the entire cast of a detail and nuance of the kind one hopes for in the finest spoken theatre. Canadian Gordon Bintner has a naturally aristocratic look and demeanour that perfectly suits the character of Onegin though his warm, velvety bass-baritone suggests the potential for passion within. His lecture to the young Tatyana may lack its sting, but Bintner gives a fully passionate account of Onegin’s arias in Act 3 of realizing he is in love and then confessing his love for Tatyana.
Canadian Joyce El-Khoury wields her smooth, amber-coloured soprano to create fine contrasting portraits of the younger Tatyana the fantasist versus the older Tatyana the realist, conveying the intensity of her character even in silence. If the Letter Scene could be just that bit more redolent of emotion, El-Khoury sings Tatyana’s scene rejecting Onegin in Act 3 while exquisitely expressing Tatyana’s violently conflicting feelings.
As Lensky, Canadian Joseph Kaiser’s tenor has become a bit cloudy in its lower register but it still breaks through to shine heroically in its upper register. This is abundantly manifest in Lensky’s long, emotion-laden pre-duel aria which received the longest and loudest acclaim of the evening.
Armenian Varduhi Abrahamyan boasts a luscious mezzo-soprano well-suited to Tatyana’s happier older sister Olga. Russian bass Oleg Tsibulko gives a sensitive account of Prince Gremin famous Act 3 aria, though it lacks the urgency and poignancy that many past singers have given it. American Margaret Lattimore with her strong bright mezzo-soprano stands out for her tastefully comic portrayal of Tatyana’s nurse, Filipyevna. Frenchman Christophe Mortagne is a fine Monsieur Triquet, a comic elderly dandy who has written vapid verses for Tatyana’s name-day celebration.
Overall, such is the beauty and elegance of Carsen’s production that one would be happy if the COC could acquire it for all its future revivals of Onegin.*
*On October 12, I learned that the COC has indeed bought the production from the Met thus owns it. That makes Onegin a production to look forward to every time it is programmed.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This is a version of a review that will appear later this year in Opera News.
Photos: (from top) Joyce El-Khoury as Tatyana and Gordon Bintner as Eugene Onegin; Joyce El-Khoury as Tatyana; Joseph Kaiser as Lensky and Varduhi Abrahamyan as Olga. ©2018 Michael Cooper.
For tickets, visit www.coc.ca.
2018-10-08
Eugene Onegin