★★☆☆☆
Other composers have always been awestruck by Tchaikovsky’s The Queen of Spades. Mahler and Rachmaninov conducted early performances. You can understand why. Besides the virtuosically febrile music and the quintessentially gloomy Russian plot (two suicides, gambling addiction, hopeless love and revenge from beyond the grave), Tchaikovsky also seems to be playing out his own neuroses within the supernatural hokum of Pushkin’s story.
So, in theory at least, the director Stefan Herheim is justified in putting not just Tchaikovsky’s neuroses, but the composer himself centre stage in this Royal Opera production. As played by the superb Vladimir Stoyanov, Tchaikovsky is a kind of pantheistic poltergeist: composing the music even as his characters sing it, conducting them, doubling as Yeletsky (the foppish suitor whom Liza