San Francisco Classical Voice

Admittedly, the part of Onegin poses large challenges. We know so little of him. (Tchaikovsky bought compression and focus by leaving out the earlier parts of Pushkin's novel showing his life as a Petersburg dandy.) The opera's Onegin is cool, restrained, philosophical and inward — without the lyrical arias granted to other characters. Yet he must erupt at the crucial moments: into anger after his trivial flirtation while dancing with Olga drives the rash Lensky to demand satisfaction in a duel; into grief when, following the forms of society, he kills his friend; and into surprised and overwhelming love when he reencounters Tatyana after four years abroad. Braun did bring real fervency to his stunned monologue at this moment, and to the final scene in which Tatyana both declares her continuing passion and rejects the hero in favor of duty to her devoted husband, Prince Gremin. Even at the end, Onegin remains more of an anti-hero who, in his fierce self-centered love, would be willing to disgrace Tatyana with a liaison or elopement that would destroy her and his cousin, the Prince.

Pathos does not belong to Onegin but rather to Tatyana, who cannot reciprocate the Prince's deep affection; to her sister Olga, whom we never see after the fatal quarrel; and to Lensky, the doomed lover-poet blessed by a simplicity that Onegin can never know. These three live in a lyrical world apart from the hero. The most gratified love turns out to be that of Prince Gremin, the older military man who expresses his adoration for Tatyana in an aria of ravishing sincerity. The part consists of this aria, and Gustav Andreassen sang it handsomely. Allyson McHardy caught Olga's energy and charm with a fresh young mezzo. Piotr Beczala's Lensky brought forth the evening's most exciting singing. The brilliance, flow and flexibility of his vocalism — more Italianate than Slavic — points to a career reaching well beyond this, his United States debut.

Conductor Ilan Volkov rose rather well to the big flowing moments while rushing transitional passages and, on the whole, keeping tempi too fast for my sense of this music. More often than not, he elicited a clean, modern, rhythmically strict style of playing from the orchestra where, to my taste, the music calls for a more flexible and plangent approach. This is a score in which it pays to stretch phrases with a rubato that works in tension with an underlying regularity of pulse.

The production, borrowed from the Netherlands Opera, was staged by Johannes Schaaf in designs by Peter Pabst, with lighting by Manfred Voss. It can stand for the best and the worst of the values espoused by departing director, Pamela Rosenberg.

On the positive side was the evocative, atmospheric simplicity of the outdoor scenes with weaving birches caught in the light of different times of day. And the immense pyrotechnical chandelier that dominates the Saint Petersburg ball where Onegin reencounters Tatyana seemed wonderful to me — really not distracting after its opening flourishes.

On the negative, why a leap from nineteenth-century appearances in prior scenes to a last, placed in a boudoir with art deco furniture? The great Princess Tatyana, no servants in evidence, receives Onegin in a wrap barely covering her nightgown. The servants must indeed be off for the day, so the hero must declare his love stumbling through at least 50 pairs of shoes that litter the stage. This mess — and the absurd masquerade costumes that deface the simple country dance given by Tatyana's mother by making it seem like something for socialites — look all too much like the touches of a dramaturge determined to earn his keep.

The staging was mixed as well. The friendship between Lensky and Onegin was not clearly set forth in at the opening. The country ball involved few dances and not the right ones. The city ball was quite over-contrived. At the duel, Onegin suddenly waives his arms to the side as if to stop the proceedings, leaving us to speculate about motives not rendered in the libretto, which, of course, requires that Lensky die. On the other hand, Tatyana's bedroom aria abounded with lovely touches like having her write part of the letter on the floor or lie on the bed for a moment with her face covered. And, stacks of shoes notwithstanding, the final confrontation between Onegin and Tatyana burst with immediacy and power. Here, as so often, one has wished that Rosenberg and her forces would place trust in the strong musical values they have brought the company, and in the often superb dramatic tension they build among characters. With these virtues at work, high-concepts in the form of masquerades and stacks of shoes are worse than superfluous.