Anush Hovhannisyan as Tatyana and Samuel Dale Johnson as Eugene Onegin
(Picture: Ali Wright)Tchaikovsky based his opera Eugene Onegin, which opened last night at Opera Holland Park, on a Pushkin novel, written 50 years before the opera’s 1879 premiere. The composer kept Pushkin’s title, but the opera could have been called Tatyana Larina, after the teenage girl who is the real focal point of Tchaikovsky’s sympathies. A young innocent, raised on her family’s country estate, she only knows about love from the literature she reads avidly. Onegin, by contrast, is a sophisticated man of the city, world-weary and arrogant, whose rejection of Tatyana’s advances comes back to haunt him years later.
Tchaikovsky wanted to free the drama from the stifling conventions of the opera house so students at Moscow conservatory gave the opera’s first performance. Opera Holland Park is neither opera house nor music college but it has its own distinct identity. It’s a semi-open-air theatre: at one point, two pigeons flew nonchalantly across the stage, and birdsong is a constant presence. Since Covid arrived, the company has rejigged the space, including installing an attractive miscellany of what look like jumble-sale chairs instead of conventional theatrical seating.
But the stage continues to be problematic. Director Julia Burbach and designer takis work hard to mitigate its inordinate width. There is an apron extending towards the audience so that the orchestra – City of London Sinfonia under Lada Valešová – is sometimes surrounded by the action. Burbach’s direction takes a cinematic, almost split-screen approach, with lots of foreground and background, yet the bustle often seems out of focus.
The single set is mobile but while it creates different spaces, it remains resolutely monumental. Robert Price’s lighting adds shadowy atmosphere but at key points, when only one character should be holding the stage, Burbach has Onegin skulking like a figment of some fevered dream. Still, Samuel Dale Johnson cuts an imposing figure, even though he’s made to run hither and thither in a distinctly un-Onegin-like manner.
His Onegin is haughty, cruel and disdainful of Tatyana’s reckless infatuation, but when, as the opera draws to a close, she turns the tables on him, his emotional inadequacy is all too easily exposed. Thomas Atkins is even more impressive as Lensky, the friend who Onegin finds himself impelled to kill in a duel – in this production, another dream sequence that doesn’t quite work. Atkins’ sturdy tenor brings a ringing intensity to a character who often seems pallid.
It’s hard for an opera singer to play a teenager. If soprano Anush Hohvannisyan isn’t always convincing as the youthful Tayana, she captures her shy impetuousness and vulnerability. At the end, though, her Tatyana becomes a serious proposition, the voice suggesting both regret and determination. At that point, we get a true sense of Hohvannisyan’s dramatic range.
