By Reviewed by Peter McCallum
Eugene Onegin
Opera Australia
Joan Sutherland Theatre, Opera House
February 28-March 28
Opera distorts the literature on which it is based for its own purposes, and productions, in turn, distort those operas to bring them to a living audience.
A great triumph: Nicole Car is a standout as Tatyana in Opera Australia's new production of Tchaikovsky's work.
The trick is to make those distortions a transformation. Tchaikovsky took the Byronic combination of satire, wit and destiny in Pushkin's verse novel Eugene Onegin and replaced it with sentiment and fateful emotion, giving it a masterfully orchestrated score and formal musical structures almost by way of compensation.
This joint production for Opera Australia and Covent Garden by director Kasper Holten and designers Mia Stensgaard (set) and Katrina Lindsay (costume) sets the work before three imposing doors which divide the psychodrama into the outer and inner world.
The world outside is animated with dance and truly splendid chorus singing, peopled in the first act with cheerful peasants and in the third with aristocrats of glittering emptiness. Dance also inhabits the inner world with silent doppelgangers of Onegin and Tatyana representing their younger selves and enacting their desires.
The ''inner houses'' also represent Tatyana's inner psychology and the collapse of both is echoed in the staging. The deceit that shatters the provincial life of the first act is accompanied by desecration of the elegant architecture while the ballroom of the final act is littered with snow, Lensky's corpse after the duel of Act 2, and dead branches to snag the women's dresses.
Vocally the production is a great triumph for Nicole Car as Tatyana, who gives a wholly absorbing account of the letter scene in which the young girl intemperately pours out her heart to the older man.
Her voice has wonderfully vivid colour, freshness, clarity and expressive immediacy, and she establishes a subtly complex relationship with her dancing double Emily Ranford. Dalibor Jenis as Onegin has a splendidly robust, well-finished sound, but with a Faustian grain hinting at restlessness and ennui in equal measure. Pushkin and Tchaikovsky create a classic pair of sisters, the one who accepts convention albeit resentfully (Olga) and the free spirit whose dreams are broken (Tatyana). Sian Pendry combined lightness of voice and brittleness of personality as the former. James Egglestone as Lensky, her ill-paired lover, has a beautifully coloured promising voice, though the sound was sometimes rather open, affecting balance, and the pitch could tolerate some tidying up.
Dominica Matthews as Madame Larina, the mother determined to marry off her daughters, had witty dowager brittleness. Jacqueline Dark, as the nurse Filippyevna, combined warmth of voice with simplicity of character. Kanen Breen created a diverting cameo as the foppish Triquet and bass Konstantin Gorny sang the Prince's aria in the last act with a voice of wonderful individuality and richness. The orchestra displayed noble strengths and some weaknesses but conductor Guillaume Tourniaire illuminated every page of the score with vivid expressive energy.