As Onegin’s even younger admirer, Tatyana, Paula Goodman Wilder displayed a warm, lyric sound and impressive dynamic range. She easily navigated the long lines and her diction was nicely inflected. Wilder’s only musical misstep occurred during the third act, when maestro Kuttner was too busy trying to harness his players to properly cue her entrance. Both Janitzky and Wilder were stilted and awkward in their acting, though Wilder improved in the last act, when the previously shy and introverted Tatyana has matured and grown sure of herself.

As Tatyana’s younger and more boisterous sister, Olga, Marie Sokolova brought energy and authenticity to a tricky role. Despite the low-lying, almost contralto tessitura, Sokolova sounded free and natural. She presented a multilayered depiction, in which it was clear that, underneath her mischievous exterior, Olga is a good-hearted, kind girl.

In a role that seemed rather too big for his voice, tenor Codrut Birsan, as Olga’s dreamy poet of a fiancé, Vladimir Lensky, sang thoughtfully and well. Although a couple of high notes sounded a bit pinched and tense, he did not push, as many would be tempted to do. His Lensky was less a Byronic, brooding artist than a painfully unsure adolescent, quite intimidated by the adult world. This made his second act aria, just before the duel with his former friend, Onegin, all the more touching.

Rounding out the cast, with varying degrees of success, were mezzo-soprano Katy Daniel as the suitably forlorn and resigned widow, Madame Larina, and a quite unsteady Ursula Pieper as Filipyevna, the nursemaid. Captain Zaretsky and Tatyana’s adoring husband, Prince Gremin, were sung by Clifton Romig and John Bischoff.

Performing the opera in Russian could have caused more problems than it did, but the principals all were adept and comfortable with the language. The chorus and many secondary characters, however, sounded timid and unsure of their diction. The large chorus produced a passable sound, but one that was occasionally unbalanced and not together.

Visually, both direction and costumes were problematic. Phil Lowery’s staging was clumsy and unnatural, inhibiting, rather than helping, the actors. Why, for example, did Tatyana’s writing desk face upstage? Wilder was forced to sing the famed letter aria while twisting horribly in order to both write and face the audience. While actual choreography, including Russian folk dance, was used, the execution looked halfhearted.

Costuming a period piece is a difficult task, of course, but designer Vivian Roubal managed to find costumes that represented just about every decade in the 19th century except the late 1820s, when the action takes place. In the first act, Lensky looked like a boy in his father’s overcoat, while Olga and Tatyana were dumped into pre-1815 Empire gowns, badly made and looking like nightgowns. In the third act, when only a couple of years are supposed to have passed, Tatyana wore first a late-1980s satin wedding gown and then an 1860s Southern belle frock.

Janitzky suffered the worst. He played his first scene in a strange pair of brown, stretch-knit stirrup pants, badly fitting and having no basis in history. The most humorous anachronism, though, was the audible rip heard when Tatyana undid the Velcro on her shoes. These details speak to the lack of general care taken in this haphazard show, whose producers seem to have thought that a few good singers are all that a successful opera needs.

(Mezzo-soprano Kathryn Miller holds degrees in singing from London's Royal Academy of Music and the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.)

©2007 Kathryn Miller, all rights reserved