When Deborah Warner’s staging of Tchaikovsky’s “Eugene Onegin” opened the Metropolitan Opera’s 2013-14 season, it was inadvertently competing with the production it replaced: Robert Carsen’s, which was beloved, precise, imaginative and remembered by many with a kind proprietary affection. A taped-for-DVD performance from 2007 starring Renée Fleming and Dmitri Hvorostovsky cemented its reputation.
Warner’s “Onegin” returned to Met on Monday, a reminder of what was lost when Carsen’s was retired: autumnal leaves blanketing the stage, interiors opening outward into landscapes that feel more like states of mind than places. The minimal set design of the old production allowed for an unflinching focus on the characters’ tormented psyches — critical for this story, which juxtaposes Byronic nihilism with naïve sincerity. (Tchaikovsky adapted the libretto himself from Pushkin’s novel in verse.)
Where Carsen offered audiences a look inside the characters, Warner keeps things on the surface, with a staging that is traditionally lavish and stylish — unmistakably Russian with its mazurkas in the countryside and dandy-esque fashions for its city folk — yet ultimately anemic. You register the action, but seldom the feeling beneath it; everything seems indicated rather than lived.
What redeems the production and its politely uninspired visuals is Tchaikovsky’s brilliant score. The music moves in small disclosures — phrases that seem to hesitate, then confess, then retreat again into something like composure. You notice the orchestra lingers just beneath the voice, not competing but holding onto what the characters cannot quite say. Even the waltzes feel faintly compromised, as though elegance were a condition already passing into regret. The music doesn’t refuse emotion, but it renders feeling as something already lost or understood too late.
In his Met debut, the conductor Timur Zangiev, only 32, knew exactly what to do with “Onegin.” With authority, he shaped the score with graceful intentionality to Tchaikovsky’s music. The rubatos felt instinctual, and no diminuendo or crescendo was taken for granted.
Equally impressive was the soprano Asmik Grigorian. She has the unnerving ability to do very little while suggesting so much: a turn of the head, a pause held just long enough to register as thought instead of hesitation. This puts the character’s emotional architecture in place. Her Tatiana begins Act 1 with a kind of private, almost adolescent ache — something unformed, withheld; by Act 3, her composure has settled into that of a woman who has learned, perhaps too well, how to contain herself.
In the title role, the baritone Iurii Samoilov sang with a notable smoothness. His Onegin has a studied detachment, a candor that reads less as confession than as refusal, until the final act, when his restraint — his regret for rebuffing Tatiana’s love all those years ago — gives way. What emerges from Samoilov’s performance is not quite passion but something closer to its appearance: heightened, deliberate and just beyond the moment it would matter.
Also arresting was the tenor Stanislas de Barbeyrac as Lenski, Onegin’s idealistic opposite. His voice was mostly warm and present, though at times strident and metallic in its higher register. His tender, remorseful interpretation of his Act 2 aria “Kuda, kuda, vi udalilis” was a highlight of the evening.
Warner’s “Onegin” never quite convinces — it’s coherent, occasionally persuasive, but ultimately negligible. It’s not bad, but the comparison lingers: The other one was better.
Eugene Onegin
In repertory through May 16 at the Metropolitan Opera, metopera.org.
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