Yesterday afternoon in the War Memorial Opera House, San Francisco Opera (SFO) presented the West Coast premiere of Robert Carsen’s staging of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s opera Eugene Onegin. Carsen created his production for the Metropolitan Opera, and the result was selected for worldwide coverage through Metropolitan Opera Live in HD. Here in the United States it was later broadcast as part of the Great Performances at the Met Public Television series.
I still remember my encounter with that telecast. The idea cramming the ballroom scene of the second act into a rectangle that occupied, at most, half of the entire stage area drove me up the wall. Why did Carsen conceive a claustrophobic nightmare to portend the dark episodes that would follow? If so, then the narrative’s approach to contrasting the light and the dark was sadly undermined.
The “crammed” ballroom space in the second act of Eugene Onegin in a close-up that does not reveal the extent of empty space (photograph by Cory Weaver, courtesy of San Francisco Opera)
The SFO production was staged by Revival Director Peter McClintock, and I have every reason to believe that McClintock was dutifully thorough. Ironically, experiencing this production in an opera house turned out to be even more disconcerting than encountering it on a television screen. Most importantly, the enormity of empty space sustains an impact far greater than any television screen could produce.
Just as important, however, is the extent to which the space itself undermines every solo vocalist on the stage. One quickly appreciates the ways in which many more conventional sets not only establish a sense of place put also provide reflective acoustic surfaces that reinforce the very act of singing. As a result, every one of yesterday afternoon’s vocalists, from the leading roles of the title character (bass-baritone Gordon Bintner) and protagonist Tatyana (soprano Evgenia Muraveva) down to Monsieur Triquet (tenor Brenton Ryan) in that same ballroom scene, had to struggle to be heard, let alone clearly articulated. Conductor Vassilis Christopoulos (making his American debut) seemed to be aware of this problem and did his best to moderate the orchestral resources to keep from overwhelming the vocalists.
For those that do not already know, Eugene Onegin began as a novel in verse by Alexander Pushkin. I have only been able to examine that text in English translation; but, even in that limited account, it was easy to appreciate how the rhythm of the poetry drives both the narrative and all of the characters forward at a passionate pace. Tchaikovsky himself prepared the libretto for the opera, working with Konstantin Shilovsky; and there are any number of ways in which one can appreciate that same forward-moving account of the narrative. Carsen’s staging seems to have given little attention to narrative flow, relegating it to second place behind little more than theatrical stunts.
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