Royal Opera, new Eugene Onegin, 2024

[oncnp]

Director Ted Huffman on Onegin from the Guardian

 

‘It is so painful to know that people pity me’: Tchaikovsky, unrequited love and me | Opera | The Guardian

Edited September 23 by oncnp

[MildConcern]

I went to the opening of Eugene Onegin last night and thought it was abject all round - from staging (or lack thereof), direction (the choices made in the letter scene and duel were infuriating) to the singing.

 

I was very disappointed, this being my favourite opera. 

[alison]

Oh dear  

 

The amount of money the Royal Opera must have wasted on productions of EO over the years must be horrendous.  I was an opera newbie when I went to see it in maybe 1994, but didn't see anything wrong with that production.

[Emeralds]

3 hours ago, MildConcern said:

I went to the opening of Eugene Onegin last night and thought it was abject all round - from staging (or lack thereof), direction (the choices made in the letter scene and duel were infuriating) to the singing.

 

I was very disappointed, this being my favourite opera. 

I'm going to bleat my usual overused refrain of "bring back the nice old production that the Royal Opera used to have which we all liked!" for Eugene Onegjn as well.

 

Not the strange Kaspar Holten one they just ditched, no. I mean the 1971 Peter Hall one that Thomas Allen sang in, with designs by Julia Trevelyan Oman (who designed RB's Nutcracker) that they used until 1993..am sure there's lots of notes, sketches, recordings etc that they could use to revive it with. I'm getting a bit bored of all operas starting to look identical, darkly lit and minimalist - like an expensive recital. Or ugly and normcore!  Sorry to hear your favourite opera has turned out this way, MildConcern. 

Edited September 25 by Emeralds

[Lizbie1]

2 hours ago, alison said:

Oh dear  

 

The amount of money the Royal Opera must have wasted on productions of EO over the years must be horrendous.  I was an opera newbie when I went to see it in maybe 1994, but didn't see anything wrong with that production.

 

TBF the new production doesn't sound like a big-budget extravaganza.

[HelenHelen]

I saw the general rehearsal as my first time watching the opera of Eugene Onegin, thought that it nicely tied in with getting to see the ballet again later this season. 

 

Don't worry, they clearly didn't splash out too much on this new production because they could evidently only afford two chairs (and some ugly tablecloths) for the set. Saw a lot of drab officewear for costumes, which gave the effect of the costume department having bought a job lot at a Next Boxing Day sale. I had no sense of time or place from the design and staging. Thought it was extremely poor (especially for a new production) that I couldn't see the action at the front corners of the stage from my central balcony spot - it must be much worse elsewhere in the house. How hard is it to dot staff around the auditorium to catch these things? However, I thought Lensky and Prince Gremin (one hell of a last-minute replacement) sang beautifully and I'd love to hear the opera again. 

 

There were differences in the plot compared with what I remember from the ballet (I haven't read the Pushkin), so I was a little confused as to whether these were choices by the director and, if so, why. (I don't want to veer into spoiler territory, though.)

[Lizbie1]

34 minutes ago, HelenHelen said:

There were differences in the plot compared with what I remember from the ballet (I haven't read the Pushkin), so I was a little confused as to whether these were choices by the director and, if so, why. (I don't want to veer into spoiler territory, though.)

 

I think under normal direction the opera is considered more faithful to Pushkin than the ballet, but from the reviews I gather there have been some definite directorial "choices".

 

What bothers me more than the bare set is that the singers are - I read - often very unhelpfully placed in it, which leads to poor balance between them and the orchestra. I wish directors could get it into their heads that bare sets wreak havoc with this kind of thing!

 

Really glad that you enjoyed the Lensky, and they were very fortunate to have Brindley Sherratt available to jump in (for the first night as well).

[MildConcern]

1 hour ago, HelenHelen said:

There were differences in the plot compared with what I remember from the ballet (I haven't read the Pushkin), so I was a little confused as to whether these were choices by the director and, if so, why. (I don't want to veer into spoiler territory, though.)

The changes to the letter writing scene (with Tatiana not being alone) and the climax of the duel are departures from the Pushkin text. Ditto the interlude with the 'lovers' (trying not to give spoilers!) at the beginning of Tatiana's name-day celebrations.

 

In my opinion, these departures totally detract from Pushkin's characterisation and the lusciousness of the score. In a way, I can live with the awful minimalist staging, but I really can't tolerate these directorial decisions. It really reeks of a director who either doesn't understand the ethos of the story, or a director who fundamentally doesn't think the original story is interesting enough (in which case he lacks romantic imagination!)

 

 

[li tai po]

I saw the premiere of Eugene Onegin on Tuesday.  I quite enjoyed the bare stage in Ted Huffman's production, because I felt it focussed our attention on the relationships, without the distraction of elaborate historical settings, although I did not appreciate some of the changes to Pushkin's plot.

 

I once saw Andriy Zholdak's production of this opera at the Mikhailovsky Theatre in St. Petersburg, a production which won a Golden Globe Award.  In the first scene of the opera there were children running around the garden with a dwarf.  In the letter scene, Tatiana had a grandfather clock and a fridge in her bedroom.  She opened the fridge, to discover the dwarf, completely naked, taking a shower inside the fridge.  When Lensky was shot, his body collapsed into the case of the grandfather clock, which morphed into a coffin and Onegin poured jugs of milk over the corpse. 

 

At the end of the performance, as we began to applaud, the orchestra struck up with the opening prelude and we continued with the first 10 minutes or so of the opera - the implication being that we would run through the opera again, but with Onegin changing his response in scene 3 - "what if?" as Ted Huffman says in his article in the RBA programme

 

I agree with Emeralds that the 1971 Peter Hall/Julia Trevelyan Oman production at the ROH remains unsurpassed.  In the early years, before the advent of surtitles, it was sung in English - with Ileana Cotrubas as luxury casting for Tatiana.  In 1979, we heard the opera in Russian for the first time, with Gabriela Benackova, Nicolai Gedda as Lensky and Yuri Masurok.  In 1988 we were spoiled with Mirella Freni as Tatiana and Nicolai Ghiaurov as Gremin.  Those were the days!

 

 

[Dawnstar]

I'm too young to have seen the Trevelyan Oman one, which I'm sure I would have liked, but I would settle for the ROH bringing back the Pimlott production from 2006 which, apart from one or two minor quirks such as Lensky's ghost putting in an appearance at the Act III ball which was turned into an ice skating party, I thought was pretty straighforward, set in about the right period & visually attractive. Thank goodness that was my first Eugene Onegin as if I had started with the Holten one I would have probably sworn off the piece for life & the current one sound doesn't like it would be much more to my taste, having gone through the reviews yesterday. I'm saving my money for the ballet version this season.

 

@li tai po That Mikhailovsky one sounds ghastly. I think I would have fled the auditorium if I'd put up with 3 hours of it & it then started over again!

[MildConcern]

One of my favourite productions is actually the Bolshoi's 2006 production which is set entirely inside a dining room. Unconventional, but they make the most of the space, which is rich with sumptuous detail and kinetic movement. It is still on Medici TV, for anyone with a subscription!

 

The Met's old production (the one with the famous Hvorostovsky and Fleming recording) was also a masterclass in how to approach minimalism on stage while still retaining a feeling to being grounded in the story. Something Ted Huffman did not approach well in the new RBO staging!

[Geoff]

As one of the maybe eight people including his mother who liked the Kasper Holten production, might I add a note in favour?
 

This show - more so in its original (I thought better) outing - belonged of course slap bang in the modern Euro tradition of aiming at those who know the work well. So some of the criticisms about it are actually just a special case of the general argument - with which I tend to agree - what about those who have never seen it before? In this country we are not, and perhaps never will be, in a culture like some continental countries, where (perhaps more so in the past) opera-going is as normal as going to the football, attracting a similar range of demographics. So opera producers start with the assumption that most people have already seen most of the main works more than once. Holten, new to Britain when working on this his first UK production, seems to have assumed as much. 

 

But that still leaves the question as to whether the production worked for those who wanted “something new”. For me, and quite possibly only for me, the show made a fine attempt at dealing with one of the imponderables of that magnificent score: why is it so sad, so very sad, from the very first bars? 
 

Most productions start - despite the heavy, even ominous, preshadowing of the music - with a gorgeous countryside atmosphere, cheerful people of various ages celebrating things they feel happy about, with a lovely if introverted teenage girl lost in her book at the centre of the action. Eventually a tall dark (sometimes dressed in black) stranger propels the action forward. Whereas Holten’s production showed us the older Onegin’s memory of his missed moment, his lost opportunity, and I found it both illuminating and moving. Not all critics hated it.

 

It was nothing to do with the poem, but the opera is in any case something rather different. 

[Dawnstar]

I'd seen 4 other Eugene Onegin productions, including 2 of them in 2 different runs, so I'd say I was reasonably familiar with the piece before I saw the Holten production. It wasn't even the first Holten production I'd seen as while it was his first main stage production for the ROH he'd already done L'Ormindo at the Sam Wanamaker playhouse & I loved that production. So I went into his Onegin production hoping to like it, only to find I really, really disliked it.

[Emeralds]

I hope it's not too cheeky to ask the @BalletcoForum Moderators if they might consider it a good idea to move the Eugene Onegin reviews and recollections to a new thread of its own, since - despite being panned by many critics and audience members (or because!) - it seems to have gained a life of its own? 

 

PS @MildConcern agree with you re: Hvorostovsky and Fleming together as Onegin and Tatiana- just wonderful.

Edited September 28 by Emeralds

[alison]

What I want to know is, WHY THE HECK (she says, moderating her tone) does this production not come with a content warning?!

[Scheherezade]

I also loved L’Ormindo at the Sam Wanamaker, Dawnstar, and whilst I didn’t hate the Kaspar Holten Onegin overall, I found the use of the dancers in flashback irredeemably distancing from an audience perspective. Sorry Geoff, that’s what killed it for me.

 

And Kasper Holten did himself no favours, of course, in making that unfortunate comment about UK audiences needing to be educated. 

[Lizbie1]

2 hours ago, Scheherezade said:

And Kasper Holten did himself no favours, of course, in making that unfortunate comment about UK audiences needing to be educated.

 

Yes!

 

Instead of talking about attendance at the opera in terms of being like going to a football match, I'd suggest the more apt (accurate?) comparison is with straight theatre. A typical London audience needs no educating about what makes for good drama.

[Dawnstar]

6 hours ago, Scheherezade said:

I also loved L’Ormindo at the Sam Wanamaker, Dawnstar, and whilst I didn’t hate the Kaspar Holten Onegin overall, I found the use of the dancers in flashback irredeemably distancing from an audience perspective. Sorry Geoff, that’s what killed it for me.

 

I agree. While I wasn't keen on the production overall visually, it was the dancer doubles for Tatiana & Onegin that I really disliked. If they were removed then I think I could have put up with the rest.

[Emeralds]

Thank you to the Forum Moderator who put this in a new thread!  🙂 🙏 💐 

[Lizbie1]

Maybe I'm going soft in my middle years but I didn't hate it.

 

Musically I thought it was very good; maybe there have been some adjustments since opening night but I had no trouble hearing the singers at any time, which was my main concern going in.

 

Dramatically I thought it was interesting and I can mostly see what the director was trying to do but I don't think it quite came off. The main problem IMO was that Onegin came across a callow youth with only a certain surface glamour to recommend him, so it was difficult to see why someone like Tatyana would continue to love him after her initial infatuation.

 

The audience reaction was very warm, I thought.

[alison]

No, I didn't hate it, either.  Apart from the pre-party and "duel" scenes which have already been mentioned.  Trouble is, for me the modern(ish?)-day setting didn't work: didn't really sit well with all the stuff about "virtuous wives", and I might half have expected Tatiana to abandon her vows, dump her husband and run off with Onegin.