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

I'm so pleased to see that this is coming out on DVD! I taped this (Met production?) off of the TV and my tape is all messed up. So now I can replace it, and with something that doesn't have a Severe Weather Warning in the corner, either.

This was a beautiful production. Tatyana and Onegin are sung by real stalwarts. But I had never heard the Mexican tenor(?) who sings Lenski and that was such a nice surprise. He has a beautiful voice and did a great job. I hope they have included the behind-the-scenes footage they showed on TV - he was chuckling that he didn't really see himself as a tragic young Russian romantic, but that he would do his best!

I've always loved my dear Onegin in any form. I am definitely pre-ordering this!

Anyone making a short list of the all time greatest operas needs to give serious consideration to Eugene Onegin. Not only is this opera filled with beautiful melodies, it also contains a very dramatic story told episodically, almost as a tableaux of grand scenes. The story is unconventional in that the lovers never get together because they are never on the same page romantically, initially he is too mature for her, then, later, ironically, when he finally becomes interested, she is too mature for him. There is death in this opera, but the real tragedy of Eugene Onegin is the title character's self-centered, unfeeling hubris, and finally his regrets. All of this is expressed through music so achingly romantic it washes over the listener like a wave. Anyone who thinks Tchaikovsky was just a composer of pretty ballets has obviously never seen or heard Eugene Onegin.

I saw this production when it was broadcast to a local cineplex earlier this year. I was so enthralled and excited by what I had experienced(I was high on this performance for days!) that I have been anxiously waiting for it to be released on DVD ever since. The production itself isn't perfect, but the performances are(the Met repeats the success of its La Traviata of a few years ago by reuniting the same three leads with the same conductor), and the result is a Eugene Onegin whose like we are unlikely to see again, at least during my lifetime.

The leads could not be more ideally cast. Renee Fleming and Dmitri Hvorostovsky are what is popularly referred as the complete package, a combination of knockout looks, intelligence, charisma, dramatic ability, oh, and did I forget to mention vocal talent? Hvorostovsky broods handsomely, and his icy detachment is chilling, abetted in no small measure by the depth of his baritone voice. His Onegin is easy to fall in love with, but hard to feel much sympathy for, at least until the end, which is how it should be. Fleming is quite a bit older than Tatianna, but is still youthfully lovely, and capable of exploring the young innocent's tormented emotions. Besides, her age and experience make her character's eventual maturation into a regal and sophisticated woman of the world that much more convincing. Fleming's mood-swinging, ultimately giddy Letter Scene brings down the house,(remember, when I saw this it was in a movie theater, watching the performance via satellite, and the result was just as overpowering). Ramon Vargas has the impassioned, jealous tenor thing down pat, he obviously draws on his experience singing Alfredo, and he makes for a fiery Lensky. The mezzo-soprano who sings Olga(I don't recall her name) is attractive and appropriately flirty. Musically, I'd rate this performance as flawless. Conductor Valery Gergiev's deep understanding of this score is obvious, so is his equally deep love for it.

The production is mostly good, but with some problems. For instance, I don't understand why Tatianna's bed is placed in the middle of the outdoors other than to give her an excuse to fling leaves across the stage at the climax of the Letter Scene. Maybe this is supposed to represent how her writing the letter is her liberation from confinement...if so, well, it works better conceptually than visually. And the ballroom scenes are minimalist to the extreme, lacking any grandeur, which attenuates the effectiveness of the staging. Certain operas, such as Traviata and this one, should always be opulent(this director could take a few lessons from Franco Zefferelli), no matter how modernist operas in general become, because the opulence is an important element of the storytelling. Onegin is supposed to be distanced from and bored by the bourgeois spectacle he sees, by the aristocratic circles he finds himself traveling in, and their values, but this is hard to convey when there isn't any bourgeois spectacle to be bored BY. My feeling, this is minimalism without any understanding of the subtexts of the opera, minimalism for its own sake, just to do something different, an attempt to add intimacy to a scene that isn't really supposed to be intimate. On a positive note, the opening scene is superb, as are the scenes where Onegin rebuffs Tatianna's affections and their final intimate drawing room duet. The duel, staged completely in shadows, is rather unsettling. Here the creepy minimalism makes perfect sense, and the result is one of the most effective opera scenes I've seen in recent memory. For the most part the production works, despite being disappointing in places, at the very least it never distracts from the performances, which might sound like a left-handed compliment but is a compliment nonetheless.

One more thing, concerning the price. I was tempted to knock off a star due to the fact that Deutsche Grammophon has chosen to release this as a two disc set even though the opera is only about two-and-a-half hours long and therefore capable of fitting on one. I have the same complaint about the upcoming I Puritani, which I saw when it was broadcast on PBS, also an excellent performance, very much worth owning, but also short enough to fit on a single disc. Obviously I'm planning to suck it up(for Onegin, and perhaps for Puritani as well) and shell out the money because the idea of not owning this is unthinkable, but in the meantime, color me disgruntled. In the end, though, I have decided to rate the performance, not the price, in which case the five stars is well deserved.