Mid Wales Opera's Eugene Onegin is a sterling effort - review 

Touring opera round smaller venues outside metropolitan areas is a heroic adventure – some might say a fool's one too – and Mid Wales Opera deserves medals for its continuing efforts on this front. Over the years I’ve admired and enjoyed its marvellously fresh and zippy stagings of Falstaff, Albert Herring, The Tales of Hoffmann (among others), presented in far-flung towns to appreciative audiences that wouldn’t otherwise see such things live. One only hopes that the relevant funding bodies continue to see the value of the exercise.

Alas, this perfectly decent new production of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin isn’t vintage. Richard Studer designs and directs, playing it very straight and providing no special insight or sensitivity to the currents of the drama. His sensitively lit set, graced with Regency period costuming, is simple and efficient, but there’s no thrust to the action or focus to the characterisation. Although the motions are dutifully gone through, nothing has been pushed or explored. Particularly feeble are the three danced scenes, which badly need the energising services of a choreographer or specialist movement director.

Jonathan Lyness, Studer’s regular collaborator at the Longborough Festival, conducts the chamber orchestra Ensemble Cymru in a steady account of the lyrical score: they do a good job, but this is maturely romantic music for which one craves a richer weightier string sound than can be provided by two fiddles, viola and cello.