Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893)
Eugene Onegin (1879)
Elena Prokina (soprano) – Tatiana
Wojciech Drabonwicz (baritone) – Onegin
Martin Thompson (tenor) – Lensky
Louise Winter (mezzo-soprano) – Olga
Yvonne Minton (mezzo-soprano) – Mme Larina
Ludmilla Filatova (contralto) – Filipyevna
Frodo Olsen (bass) – Gremin
London Philharmonic Orchestra/Sir Andrew Davis
Graham Vick – director
rec. July 1994, Glyndebourne, UK
Opus Arte OA1374D DVD [155]
The continued investigation of the Glyndebourne legacy by Opus Arte now reaches one of the earliest productions in the new opera house in 1994. Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin has always been the most popular and successful of the composer’s operas in the West, and it has also been extremely fortunate in its representation on video from Russian films dating from the 1940s onwards, as well as in plentiful audio recordings. Inevitably it has attracted a good many modern re-interpretations in recent years from various European and American would-be wunderkind producers, most of which fight a losing battle against the music and result in absolute travesties of the original. It has to be borne in mind that Eugene Onegin is essentially a domestic opera, focusing around events in the lives of a small number of characters and their developing relationships over a period of several years; it has none of the concentrated tragic elements found in Tchaikovsky’s other lyric dramas – even the death of the hapless Lensky at the end of Act Two is hardly allowed to disturb the ongoing evolution of the characters in the later stages of the plot. At the same time the characters themselves display a depth of emotion and involvement which is unusual in nineteenth century domestic dramas; all of the principals, with the possible exception of the callow Olga, have a degree of individuality and personality which encourages the listener to engage with their dilemmas and actions. But none of them overstep the mark, which is why productions which emphasise the despair of Onegin and Tatiana at the end of the opera – some even resulting in a double suicide – so fail to appreciate the essential civilisation of the tightly reined emotions. Only the blithely optimistic Gremin really emerges at the end with a happy resolution, but even so the audience knows that the others will do their best to carry on with their lives despite their disillusionments and disappointments.
Which is what makes this production by Graham Vick so valuable. By stripping the non-essential decorative elements – the rural countryside setting of the opening, the society ballrooms of St Petersburg at the end – back to their bare minimum, he manages to concentrate the attention of the listener and the viewer on these personal relationships and thereby brings the characters more vividly to emotional life than any Regietheater overstatements could possibly achieve. In this he is superbly aided and abetted by a young cast that looks and identifies with those characters in an entirely credible manner. Elena Prokina evolves in an entirely believable manner from the naïve teenager of the country house parties at the beginning to the sophisticated society hostess who coldly receives and rejects the advances of the young man for whom she had formerly nursed a hopeless infatuation. Wojtech Drabowicz avoids the trap of making the young Onegin too much of a prig or a sophisticate – his supercilious approach is as much of an assumed act as her girlish passion – and this makes his sudden realisation of his real feelings all the more tragic when he eventually confronts them. Eugene Onegin is not Pride and Prejudice – both the protagonists are equally obtuse in their failure to come to terms with their feelings, and their attempts at worldly sophistication are never more than skin deep. Martin Thompson is equally out of his emotional depth as the romantic Lensky, only coming to terms with his real feelings when he is confronted with his own mortality in his aria just before his death (and singing superbly throughout). Louise Winter does what she can with the role of his unfeeling girlfriend, and having an artist of the stature of Yvonne Minton as the elderly matriarch brings a sense of gravity to a role that can too easily become unfeeling. Even minor roles such as Ludmilla Filatova as the nurse and John Fryatt as the would-be intellectual sophisticate Triquet are carefully observed and claim our attention as individuals with their own feelings and concerns. Frode Olsen was a regular at Glyndebourne during this period, and his rich tones are well suited to the fatuous platitudes of Gremin as the self-satisfied husband in his show-stopping aria.
The restoration of the booklets in these Naxos-licensed reissues is welcome. The original production, it is perhaps amusing to note, was sponsored by Lehmann Brothers in the halcyon period before they projected the whole world into the 2008 recession. Subtitles are provided in no fewer than seven languages, but oddly enough not including the original Russian.
Paul Corfield Godfrey
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Additional cast
John Fryatt (tenor) – Triquet
Christopher Thornton-Holmes (bass) – Zaretsky
Howard Quilla Croft (baritone) – Captain
Bryony Brind and Stephen Jeffries – dancers
Richard Hudson – designer
Ron Howell – choreographer
Thomas Webster – lighting designer
Technical details
Subtitles: German, English, French, Japanese, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese
4.3: Dolby Digital
All regions
