Eugene Onegin review – much love and passion to admire in uneven new staging

Opera Holland Park’s new production of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin is directed by Julia Burbach, whose staging for the company of Mascagni’s L’Amico Fritz made such an impression last summer. Sadly, her Onegin is more uneven – insightful and often moving, but also swerving away, at times waywardly, from the theatrical naturalism the work’s almost Chekhovian dramaturgy demands.

Placing the single interval after act two, scene one, she makes much of the parallels, musical as well as dramatic, between Tatyana’s love for Onegin and his later passion for her. Each half of the opera is now effectively viewed from a single perspective – first hers, then his – and each forms a mirror image of the other as Burbach presents not only external events but the comparable working of her protagonists’ minds and imaginations. Anush Hovhanissyan’s Tatyana daydreams about Samuel Dale Johnson’s Onegin during the prelude and he materialises at her side as she fantasises about his response to her letter, a process later reversed, in terms of both imagery and physical gesture, when she appears beside him as he writes in desperation to her.

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Both times, the subsequent contrast between illusion and reality comes over as painfully cruel, but you can’t help but feel that Burbach is overstating her case and that her staging is at times stronger elsewhere. The scene in which Madame Larina (Amanda Roocroft) and Filippyevna (Kathleen Wilkinson), reflect on how the habits of age erase the happiness of youth is extraordinarily touching. More importantly, the disintegration of the relationship between Dale Johnson and Thomas Atkins’s Lensky – no shy Romantic dreamer, but witty, mercurial and idealistic – is superbly handled.

This is also due in part to the fact that both men give terrific performances. A theatrical animal as well as a fine singer, Dale Johnson wonderfully captures Onegin’s charisma and the world-weary ennui that manifests itself in self-destruction. Atkins’s Lensky is gloriously sung: this is a lovely voice and his aria, a model of restrained intensity and extraordinary dynamic control, is arguably the evening’s high point. Hovhannisyan, with her slightly metallic tone, is more convincing perhaps as the moral woman of the closing scenes than the naive, bookish girl at the start, though the letter scene is exquisitely done. Lada Valešová’s conducting is admirable in its avoidance of grand gestures, but fractionally too slow for my taste. The choral singing is excellent.

Eugene Onegin is in repertory at Opera Holland Park, London until 25 June.