Lyrical laments
Michael Tanner
Eugene Onegin Welsh National Opera Special ENO event Coliseum Tn Tchaikovsky's most powerful operas, Istrong feelings count for everything. They are unlikely to lead to happiness, or to any kind of fulfilment, but they show that you are alive. Life and Fate tend to undermine our plans, but so long as you got upset enough about something or somebody, your life was as little in vain as our lives can be. Hence in Eugene Onegin the two characters everyone in the audience loves are Tatyana and Lensky. the one everyone hates is Onegin, and the one everyone claims to respect, if not to warm to, is Prince Gremin, who feels as strongly as a man of advanced years can be expected to, and who gives Tatyana a position in society and emotional support — just what she seemed not to be interested in early on in her great scena. The two great effusions of feeling in Onegin are that scena and Lensky's aria before Onegin kills him in the duel. Tchaikovsky's insistence that the opera should be called 'lyrical scenes' rather than 'opera' is justified, because there is no dramatic structure to speak of, and the turning points of the action — Onegin's rejection of Tatyana, the duel itself, even Tatyana's final rejection of Onegin — are notable for the undramatic quality of their music.
That gives rise to the question: how attractive a figure should Onegin be? Make him utterly cold and distant, and it's hard to sympathise all that much with Tatyana's passion for him. Yet, as Tugan Sokhiev, the conductor of Welsh National Opera's new production, points out, in what is mainly an interview that gives no illumination, he is suffering from a contemporary malady, a generalised lack of emotional vitality. If that's so, then it's a very good idea for him not to marry Tatyana, and one can only applaud his categorical refusal of her advances. Their marriage would have been as much of a disaster as Tchaikovsky's was because he didn't want to be an Onegin — but how much better it would have been for both parties if he had been.
In James Macdonald's production, which is admirably lucid and unobtrusive, Vladimir Moroz is handsome, withdrawn, and seems, until the final scene, to be vocally underpowered. He finally belts out his plea to Tatyana to think again, and one is left more than ever with the feeling that Tchaikovslcy simply didn't bother to create a coherent character. But it's a good idea to try to make more of him than Moroz self-denyingly does. It puts the emotional weight all the more exclusively on Tatyana, and Amanda Roocroft seizes the opportunity, and presents one of the most heartwarming heroines I have seen. She looks very young, behaves with winning ingenuousness, and it's only when, in the last scene, she becomes strident that I felt any reservations about her performance. But she does need to pay attention now to what seems to be happening to her voice.
Lensky is portrayed as a slightly seedy poet, with long greasy locks — something that Onegin takes over in his memory, perhaps, after the duel — and no dress sense. Marius Brenciu has a tight but attractive voice, and his lament provided the second highpoint of the evening. Sokhiev is a heart-on-sleeve conductor, favouring heavy accents and slow tempi, and it needed Brenciu's breath control to go along with the cosmic gloom that Sokhiev created. What Sokhiev lacks is the light touch, so the dance scenes were leaden, the polonaise an unpleasantly military-sounding affair. There was no foreground and background in the performance, which meant that everything was treated with such gravity that the evening extended for more than half an hour beyond its scheduled time.
The Gremin of Brindley Sherratt was a model of sensitive inflection, battling against the conductor's determination to turn his devoted explanation of his love into a dirge. If Sokhiev can tighten and lighten up, this Onegin will be well worth seeing.
The Coliseum has opened again at last, after the cool cancellation of the run of Nixon in China and the first Rhinegold. We were invited to a Bollinger champagne reception and afterwards in the auditorium to 'our special ENO event'. That turned out to be speeches from Sean Doran, Paul Daniel, Martin Smith and an unscheduled and typical expression of whatever it is that he expresses from Peter Sellars; and Act 1, scene 3 of Nixon in China. That scene, the banquet and speeches and toasts, is fine in context but limp out of it. The performance was also an eloquent demonstration of how hard it is in the Coliseum to hear the words, even when the orchestra is subdued as it is in this piece. Knowing the piece fairly well, sitting in row 0 of the stalls, I could catch about one word in five.
The building does look spruce, as one would hope. I'm no expert on what one might expect for £41 million, but quite a lot. The scene on entering the theatre was of all the old bottlenecks, impassable stairs, the virtual impossibility of moving around when the place is even half full. For champagne drinkers the occasion may have been fun; and for the consultants who no doubt got an ample slice of that £41 million there was plenty of cause for beaming. Otherwise one looks forward to the test of a serious evening at the opera.
Previous page
