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.
