Opera Reviews
28 March 2024
Untitled Document

An Onegin full of memories



by Catriona Graham
Tchaikovsky: Eugene Onegin
Scottish Opera
May 2018

As Jane Austen recognised, romantic heroines have a tendency to be silly wee lassies, especially if they are bookish, and Tatyana, in Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin is no exception. Quiet and shy, when her livelier sister’s beau brings a friend along on a visit, she falls for the handsome stranger who arrives estate on a REAL horse (black, with a white blaze, for the record). Carried away by emotion, overnight she pours out her heart on paper and sends the letter the following morning. By the time he arrives in the afternoon and lectures her on her lack of propriety, she is speechless with embarrassment and shame.

Director Oliver Mears frames Scottish Opera’s new production as recollection, triggered by the old Tatyana visiting her now-abandoned childhood home. After moving the furniture into position, she opens the door to let the memories in. While the men are dressed for the 1820s, the women look more Edwardian, and the older Tatyana wears a knee-length pinafore dress.

If Tatyana’s voice sounds a bit old for the teenager she is at the start, her demeanour in the Letter Song portrays the angst of first infatuation. Natalya Romaniw’s sound is perfect, however, for her sophisticated maturity in the third act. Her sister Olga (Sioned Gwen Davies) is a jolly, bouncing girl, whose happiness is also destroyed by Onegin; his remorse, however, does not go that far. Peter Auty, invests, her beau, Lensky with depth. Uncomplicated and unaffected, he still objects to Onegin flirting with her and his letter song is imbued with genuine feeling.

The harvesters in the first scene and the dancers at the name-day ball are seen through gauze, silhouettes at the edge of memory. Tatyana’s embarrassment at Monsieur Triquet’s song is palpable, however well it is sung by Christopher Gillett.

The Act 3 polonaise is danced exquisitely by Eve Mutso, in an apparent re-enactment of Onegin’s exile, before he returns to St Petersburg and finds himself at a party – given by a relative who just happens to have married Tatyana.

Graeme Broadbent’s Prince Gremin can hardly believe his luck in finding such love so late in life and his bass is warm as chocolate. This is almost too much for Onegin, no longer the tall, slim, elegant figure in a blue coat. Now he is stooped, clutching his stomach as if in pain.

Samuel Dale Johnson is a dashing, Darcy-esque, Onegin, handling well the switches in emotion in his stylish baritone. It is only when he sees her as Gremin’s wife – poised, elegant – that he realises his mistake in not recognising her potential under her shyness, but it is too late. The parallels with the life her mother (Alison Kettlewell) describes back at the beginning with the nurse Filipyevna (Anne-Marie Owens) are only too obvious.

The orchestral playing is light, with the melodies passed seamlessly around the instruments. Stuart Stratford keeps an admirable balance between stage, pit and – usually offstage – chorus.

Finally, Rosy Sanders plays old Tatyana with great stillness and poignancy, observing her past, sometimes longing to intervene.

Text © Catriona Graham
Photo © James Glossop
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