A near-ideal staging of a perfect opera
Michael White on Eugene Onegin at Glyndebourne and the ENO's Rosenkavalier
6 June 2008

There are grander, more emotionally loaded operas than Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin but none more perfect or loveable. And when Graham Vick's Glyndebourne production opened some 14 years ago - which worryingly seems like yesterday - I thought it a near-ideal staging of this perfect opera: tender, delicate, with a transparency and spareness that caught the essence of the piece and those painfully fragile feelings of rejection and regret on which it turns.

Fourteen years on, Glyndebourne has revived the show - largely, I suppose, as an opportunity for its current music director Vladimir Jurowski to flex his Russian muscles. And it remains to this day the best production I know.

Inevitably, some of the freshness has gone. And the one scene that never worked - an archly parodic treatment of the St Petersburg ball - still doesn't, even though this revival is done not by Vick himself but by his choreographer-colleague Ron Howell, who devised the original dance numbers for the show and might have celebrated his promotion to overall control by refining them.

But otherwise it's still a little miracle of pleasure, playing on spare, pale-pastel sets, with a simple but smart inner space for Act II that enables dancing crowds to sweep continuously on and offstage through Tatyana's birthday party and then allows the duel to be fought out of sight - providing a wonderful moment of suspense as you hear the shots but don't know who's dead (so long as you can forget you read the synopsis).

Best of all, this production has a comparably simple and smart way of mirroring Onegin's Act I rejection of Tatyana with Tatyana's Act III rejection of Onegin, done with nothing but a pair of chairs facing opposite directions on an empty stage. And being the most eloquent chairs I've ever seen on an opera stage, they effectively tell you the entire story of the piece: a story of two souls together but apart, and held there by youthful mistakes (her eagerness, his disdain) with long-term consequences.

As for the performances this time around, it's not a dream cast but a good one. Massimo Giordano's Lensky is a clumsy actor but sensationally strong, impactful voice that pumps fat Italian tone into plaintive Russian arias. Ales Jenis, the Onegin, could do with more bite and less reserve - but then, reserve is what the role is about. And the Latvian soprano Maria Gortsevskaya makes an impressive Tatyana - although the test here is whether you find yourself as in love with her as Tchaikovsky clearly was, and there were moments in the all-critical Letter Scene when I wavered.

Jurowski's conducting left me similarly wavering: well-shaped, with handsome sounds emerging from the London Philharmonic, but smoothing over things that needed greater definition and slowing down the tempi to indulgence-levels in the spotlit arias for Lensky and Prince Gremin.

Back in London, ENO have picked up a Rosenkavalier production that has already played Glasgow and drawn a fair amount of interest - not least because it's by David McVicar, who seems to have taken over Graham Vick's former role as the punchy but not too provocative hot name of British opera staging.

His Rosenkavalier falls into exactly that category: done straight, with a degree of conventional period opulence but just enough edge to engage those who've seen this Straussian standard all too often, without offending those who can't see it often enough. That kind of judgment is a real skill, and it's why McVicar is in demand.

The Rosenkavalier, though, isn't his best work - partly because all three acts play on effectively the same set, without enough contrast between the old money of the Marschallin's palace and the new money of Faninal's (a key issue in a social comedy); partly because the poignancy of the Marschallin as an older woman surrendering her younger lover to someone his own age doesn't register as it should, with a dramatically inhibited (aka wooden) performance from Janice Watson as the woman in question.

But that said, Sarah Connelly (the best cross-dresser in the business) makes a vigorously plausible Octavian. Newcomer Sarah Tynan (somebody to watch) is stunning as Sophie, the sweetly social-climbing airhead he perhaps unwisely falls for. And John Tomlinson plays Baron Ochs like an aristocratic version of Alan Sugar: a character who appalls and entertains in equal measure and, you might say, steals the show - except that steal would be the wrong word. A performance so immaculate, so wonderfully conceived and handsomely projected claims it as of right.