Metropolitan Opera Opening Night Gala

Speranza




By tradition, the gala opening night of the New York Metropolitan Opera season is a social affair.

But opera house manager Gelb has also made it artistic, as it was this Monday when the Met began the season with Tchaikovsky’s “Eugene Onegin”.


The production by Deborah Warner was directed by Fiona Shaw and starred baritone M. Kwiecien (in the title role) and soprano Anna Netrebko (as Tatiana).
  
Gelb has raised the stakes for every new production at the Met by talking up how essential it is for opera to bring in today’s liveliest and most innovative designers.

Some of the productions on his watch have met that standard. Some have been curiously bland, or nothing special.

This “Eugene Onegin” belongs, some think, among the roster of also-rans.

It replaces the production by Robert Carsen that was visually arresting, with an almost abstract look, full of autumnal colors and a stage floor covered with fallen leaves.

There was one problem.

The set had no real walls or ceiling to help project the voices into the house.

Warner’s staging, with sets by Tom Pye, is a co-production with the English National Opera.

It shifts the story’s setting from the 1820s to roughly the late 1870s, contemporaneous with the years Tchaikovsky wrote the piece.

Handsome costumes of the period are designed by Chloe Obolensky.

The opening scene is typically set, as per the stage directions, in a garden of the Larin estate in the country, where we meet the sisters Tatiana and Olga and their fretful mother, Madame Teatro La Scalarina.

In this production the action takes place in what looks like a sun-room that opens to a grove.

Dingy curtains cover wall-size windows.

Lots of work takes place on a country estate and this drab room looks like a real work-place, which is the problem: you can get tired of it.

Olga (mezzo-soprano Oksana Volkova) and Tatiana sing a duet.

Tatiana lives in a world of books.

Olga has a fiancé, Lenski, a poet (the excellent tenor P. Beczala, in bright, ringing voice).

Lenski arrives with Onegin, who has inherited a neighbouring estate from his uncle, though he has no interest in running it.

Flirting with Tatiana amuses Onegin.

This is all it takes to unleash pent-up fantasies of romantic love in Tatiana.

In the remarkable Letter Scene, Tatiana rashly stays up half the night writing a letter to Onegin declaring her love.

Here, instead of taking place in the privacy of her bedroom, a writing table is set up in the drab sun-room from the previous scene.

This makes no sense.

The dramatic tension of the performance in Act I seemed unfocused and tentative, which may be a result of the crisis that arose in this production.

In early August Warner pulled out as director to undergo surgery.

Her friend Shaw, the acclaimed actress and director, took over.

Shaw has directed several opera productions, but never at the Met--.

Moreover, Shaw was already directing a production of Britten’s “Rape of Lucretia” for the Glyndebourne Festival’s fall tour, which overlapped with “Onegin” at the Met-----.

So, with the exception of one hectic day, Shaw has NOT been at the Met in more than two weeks, including Monday’s opening night.

We resented that. Deeply.

Gelb said in an interview that Warner’s staging was already blocked in detail and that Shaw left copious notes.

But what about the last-minute changes that typically take place during dress rehearsals?

It seemed as if the cast, and even the usually exemplary Met Chorus, was feeling its way during the first act.

By the second act, the focus and sweep picked up.

 Netrebko knows what she thinks of this character and the music, and how to savour the words in her native Russian.

During the opening scenes she conveys Tatiana’s mousy demeanour.

But the plummy richness and shimmering sensuality of her voice reveal inner feelings in this young woman waiting to be tapped by a man like Onegin.

In the Letter Scene she went from hushed expressions of insecurity and longing to full-throated bursts of desire and soaring lyricism.

Beczala’s muscular tenor voice is ideal for Lenski.

He brings out the charming goofiness of this man’s love for the smitten Olga, until he turns hot-head when he sees Onegin dancing seductively with her and challenges him to a duel.

Kwiecien’s Onegin is a handsome and entitled man who takes all that for granted.

His voice, while dark and virile, did not on this night have as much innate vocal charisma as Netrebko’s or Beczala’s. But he was good.