Eugene Onegin, Opera Holland Park, 31 July 2012

Eugene Onegin – Mark Stone
Tatiana – Anna Leese
Lensky – Peter Auty
Olga – Hannah Pedley
Mme Larina – Anne Mason
Filipievna – Elizabeth Sikora
Prince Gremin – Graeme Broadbent
Triquet – Patrick Mundy
Zaretsky/Captain – Barnaby Rea

Daniel Slater (director)

Leslie Travers (set designs)
Mark Jonathan (lighting)
Denni Sayers (choreography)

City of London Sinfonia

Opera Holland Park Chorus (chorus master: Kelvin Lim)
Alexander Polianichko (conductor)

This was unquestionably the best all-round performance I have yet seen from Opera Holland Park, staging and musical performances alike often putting august metropolitan houses from around the world to shame. Where musical direction has sometimes proved variable, in Alexander Polianichko, OHP had recruited a fine Tchaikovsky conductor. (His reading of Cherevichki at the Royal Opera House was the first time I encountered his work.) Polianichko clearly felt at ease with the score and communicated that ease freely. Tempi and transitions were all well handled, nothing especially drawing attention to itself, the drama progressing ‘naturally’ from the musical ebb and flow – though, as we all know, it takes a great deal of art to conceal art. This might not have been the searing drama I heard Daniel Barenboim bring to Tchaikovsky’s opera in Berlin, but it served the work very well. It would be vain to suggest that the City of London Sinfonia would not have benefited from a greater number of strings – and there was room in the pit – but a chamber-orchestral performance worked far better than I had expected, noticeably better, indeed, than it had for Mozart or Beethoven, which suggests that the conductor and the performers on the night were at least as important  as actual numbers. Certainly the strings played with cultivation and commitment. If they were sometimes overshadowed by some ravishing woodwind playing, the problem of balancing was not their fault.

Daniel Slater’s production was manifestly superior in every respect to the lifeless, Made-for-the-Met offering Deborah Warner foisted upon the Coliseum earlier this season. It will be interesting to see how Slater’s staging compares with the new production Kasper Holten is preparing for Covent Garden, since during a couple of conversations I had with Holten earlier this year, he mentioned the importance of memory to his conception of the work. (I think I can give that away at least, since it is not really giving anything away!) That certainly shine through in Slater’s understanding too, Onegin a ghostly, dream-like figure often watching when he was not participating. Leslie Travers’s set – which might, and I mean this as a compliment – work equally well for an intelligent production of Der Rosenkavalier, evoke faded grandeur, the end of a line, aristocratic furniture upended, reminding us that Onegin was an outsider both chronologically as well as temperamentally. The third act, five years later, is set during the early years of the Revolution, the Polonaise treated as an opportunity for temporal relocation, young Soviet soldiers rearranging the stage, laying out a red carpet for (General?) Gremin and his well-connected wife, and, most touchingly, the nurse Filipievna snuffing out the candles from the Larinas’ chandelier. It rises again, in fine post-revolutionary fettle, seemingly powered by newer, electric means, putting one inevitably in mind of Lenin’s equation of communism as Soviet power plus electrification of the whole country. I wondered at first how the new, Leninist setting would benefit the work, but was entirely won over, for the point was not so much the Leninist setting – though might that not also be an interesting idea: Onegin as Bolshevik, soon disaffected? – as the passing of time. There is nothing wrong, of course, with that being expressed as originally envisaged, but Tsarist St Petersburg is not in itself the point any more than Leningrad might be.

Books play an important role too. When we meet Tatiana, she is very much engrossed in her book (Richardson, presumably), something of a plain-Jane in contrast to the flightier Olga. Her mother, of course, counsels her – whether it be wisely is another matter – that she had to grow out of the fictions her youthful reading engendered, in order to live in the real world. The replacement of the Larinas’ library by an all-red set of books – suggesting, perhaps, a Progress Publishers’ collected edition, even though that fabled firm would not be founded until 1931? – again provides an excellent visual shorthand for the changed circumstances of the third act. Tatiana’s frustration is powerfully represented by her sweeping those books from the shelves.

In many respects, I felt that Slater’s staging brought Tchaikovsky’s opera, or at least its central character, closer to Pushkin’s ‘original’ than is usually the case. For not only is Onegin an outsider, he is filled with restlessness, and one has a very clear sense of him journeying from one scene to the next, much as in Pushkin’s lyric narrative. There is one loss here – though this is far from confined to this particular staging – in that there is relatively little room for Tchaikovsky’s homoeroticism, intentional or otherwise. Still, no staging of an interesting work will be able to deal with every concrete aspect, let alone with every dramatic possibility. This was the only staging I can recall seeing in the theatre to compare with Steven Pimlott’s bizarrely underrated production for the Royal Opera.  

Mark Stone presented an Onegin handsome of tone as well as presence, aloof, restless, tormented without the slightest hint of exaggeration. Anna Leese was an excellent foil as Tatiana, her portrayal as intelligent, as dramatically progressive, as it was moving. Hannah Pedley’s Olga was pleasingly rich-toned, without detriment to her relative flightiness as a character (especially in this production). Whilst Peter Auty’s Lensky was well received, I found his performance and Patrick Mundy’s Triquet the only real disappointments in the cast, both somewhat coarse of timbre, the former in particular often sounding as if he would be happier singing Puccini. Otherwise, there was much to enjoy in the finely etched Mme Larina and Filipievna of Anne Mason and Elizabeth Sikora respectively, and in the less-geriatricly-portrayed-than-usual Gremin of Graeme Broadbent. The choral singing was excellent, an ideal match of clarity and weight, testament surely to excellent training from chorus master, Kelvin Lim. A memorable evening indeed.

Cherevichki, Royal Opera, 20 November 2009

(Set design: Mikhail Mokrov)

Royal Opera House, Covent Garden

Solokha – Larissa Diadkova
The Devil – Maxim Mikhailov
Chub – Vladimir Matorin
Panas – John Upperton
Oxana – Olga Guryakova
Vakula – Vsevold Grivnov
Pan Golova – Alexander Vassiliev
The Schoolmaster – Viacheslav Voynarovskiy
Odarka – Olga Sabadoch
Wood Goblin – Changhan Lim
Echo – Andrew Macnair
His Highness – Sergei Leiferkus
Master of Ceremonies – Jeremy White

Principal Dancers – Mara Galeazzi, Gary Avis
Dancers of the Royal Ballet – Tara-Brigitte Bhavnani, Cindy Jourdain, Kirsten McNally, Pietra Mello-Pittman, Bennet Garside, Kenta Kura, Ernst Meisner, Johannes Stepanek
Cossack Dancers – Ivan Furgala, Arron Jones, Greg Smith, Bruce Tetlow

Francesca Zambello (director)
Mikhail Mokrov (set designs)
Tatiana Noginova (costume designs)
Rick Fisher (lighting)
Alastair Marriott (choreography)

Orchestra of the Royal Opera House
Chorus of the Royal Opera House (chorus master: Stephen Westrop)
Alexander Polianichko (conductor)

Alexander Polianichko’s enthusiasm, when I interviewed him, for Tchaikovsky’s Cherevichki was infectious. His advocacy of the score in the theatre proved equally strong. No one in the audience could have been in any doubt concerning the identity of the composer. The characteristic Tchaikovskian ebb and flow, the orchestral sound, the sheen and sweep of the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House’s strings: all were present and convincing. The need of which he spoke to allow the singers to be heard was met, without reducing the orchestral contribution in stature – the ‘accompanying’ route of lesser conductors. If the work came across as somewhat sectional, that is because it is, but also a consequence of the audience’s irritating habit of applauding everything (that is, when people could be distracted from coughing and sounding their electronic devices).

For the problem really lies with the work itself. The Royal Opera House should be applauded for mounting its first ever production. (Apart from a Garsington production in 2004, that seems to be just about it in terms of British stagings – and even the Bolshoi does not have the work in its repertory.) Cherevichki certainly deserves its chance to step out from the shadows and is indeed a better work than many that hold their place in the repertory – anything by Verdi, for instance. But Eugene Onegin or The Queen of Spades it is not, let alone Mussorgsky. The score has its moments, especially during the ballet music, here superbly choreographed by Alastair Marriott and exquisitely danced, making for a definite extra attraction for opera-loving balletomanes – or should that be the other way round? Royal Ballet principals Mara Galeazzi and Gary Avis impressed greatly, as did members of the corps de ballet and the Cossack dancers, three of them members of the Zaporozhian Cossacks. The St Petersburg music of the third act – in Tchaikovsky’s terms, that is, for here the four acts were presented as two – has its moments as well, not least the courtly evocations of The Queen of Spades. But the evocations of fate do not seem to lead anywhere; unlike the symphonies or the greater operas, nothing really seems to be at stake. The Italianate passages tend towards Glinka or indeed Verdi. Moreover, the lighter moments, of which they are many, tend towards the nondescript; humour was never really the composer’s forte. I should have defied anyone to find amusing the concealment of Solokha’s admirers in coal sacks, or their emergence therefrom, but the audience reaction proved me wrong.(Few operatic comedies are actually funny, and even when they are, for instance Le nozze di Figaro or Die Meistersinger, their greatness lies in a true sadness that eludes the composer on this occasion.) What often emerges is a surprisingly nationalistic Tchaikovsky, with considerable folk-song reference, but one who finds it hard to convince. Often he will do so by insistence; here he flits around somewhat, without achieving the magical lightness of touch of so much of his ballet music.

The singing was mixed. Diction was generally good; even as a non-Russian speaker, I think I could have transcribed a good number of the words. Maxim Mikhailov showed that he could act as well as sing, as the Devil, though one might have expected a greater ‘presence’ in both senses. Larissa Diadkova exhibited more of this as the witch Solokha, though with a few vagaries of tuning. Sadly, there were more than a few in Olga Guryakova’s, especially during the first act, where she was all over the place. Some might find the generosity of her vibrato idiomatic; for the rest of us it was something of a trial. She came more into her own in the final act, but there were too many unpleasant memories by then truly to be convinced. Her beloved, Vakula, received a stronger performance from Vsevolod Grivnov, hapless by intent rather than by default. The massed array of deep Russian voices did not disappoint, and there were notable performances in St Petersburg from Sergei Leiferkus and Jeremy White.

Francesca Zambello’s production plumbed no depths, but that is hardly what the work is about. The direction of the characters was alert and musical. I do not know how much input Marriott as choreographer had here, but whoever was responsible for tallying words, gesture, and music deserves gratitude. (Such an alliance should go without saying, but tone-deaf stage direction is, sadly, more often the rule than the exception.) The greatest impression was made by Mikhail Mokrov’s stage designs and Tatiana Noginova. Their Ukrainian naïveté and, during the Petersburg scene, courtly opulence are richly evocative. It made perfect sense to learn from a programme article that Mokrov is an illustrator, for it is a children’s picture-book that is most often evoked. As in the case of the Mariinsky’s Tale of Tsar Saltan, brought last season to Sadler’s Wells, it is difficult for a jaded Westerner not to take these scenes ironically, but I do not think that is how they were intended. Young children will, I suspect, be enchanted by them, though whether they will have the patience for a three-hour opera, interval included, is another matter.

The opera, then, is no neglected masterpiece, but this is so rare an opportunity afforded by Covent Garden that it is well worth grasping. There are plans to broadcast it on BBC Radio 3 (Saturday 5 December, 6.30 p.m.) and on BBC 2 at some point over Christmas. It is also scheduled for release on DVD, ensuring that a larger audience will be able to judge for itself. One small matter: the Royal Opera has, understandably, used an English title, The Tsarina’s Slippers rather than the Russian for the ‘slippers’, Cherevichki. Richard Taruskin, who ought to know, counsels that they are not slippers at all, but ‘high-heeled, narrow-toed women’s holiday boots’. I can understand why The Tsarina’s or, as we hear in the text, Tsaritsa’s High-heeled, Narrow-toed, Women’s Holiday Boots might not have been thought the best title, but ‘boots’ rather than ‘slippers’ perhaps?

(For more pictures of the set designs, see my interview with the conductor.)

Tchaikovsky's Cherevichki: Interview with Alexander Polianichko

Photograph of Alexander Polianichko: Catriona Bass
Stage designs: Tatiana Noginova
Set designs: Mikhail Mokrov

20 November will witness the opening of the Royal Opera’s first ever production of Tchaikovsky’s Cherevichki (usually, though, according to Richard Taruskin, incorrectly, rendered in English as ‘The Tsarina’s Slippers’). Alexander Polianichko will conduct an almost entirely Russian cast, directed by Francesca Zambello. Mr Polianichko was kind enough to speak to me about work and production. I started by asking him how the rehearsals were going.

AP: Fantastic! They’re really great. Today, I think, was the second, yes the second, stage rehearsal, and we have already done half of the opera. We have been working hard on the balances, because, when you have the scenery, you have to remember that it can reflect sound and that the orchestra always prefers to play loudly...! It is a big orchestra, of course, Tchaikovsky’s orchestra: opera in the grand style.

MB: How many strings are you using?

AP: A minimum of six desks of first violins, down to four or maybe five double basses. It’s a big sound. And there is the chorus too: smaller than in Tchaikovsky’s time, a little, but that is a matter of costumes and so on – and also, though I can’t really say this, the crisis we have at the moment...

MB: No, of course, I understand...

AP: And it’s mostly a question of balance anyway.

MB: This is the first time Cherevichki has been done at Covent Garden.

AP: It’s not strange, because in Russia, it is not very popular as well. You know the recordings of Cherevichki? One of them, from the Bolshoi Theatre, is from 1947/48, under [Alexander] Melik-Pashaev. There is a later one from [Vladimir] Fedoseyev. And the recordings sound totally different, that one thirty or thirty-five years later. More recently, [Gennadi] Roshdestvensky recorded it in 2000.

MB: On Chandos?

AP: Yes, that’s right. The situation is very different from Onegin or The Queen of Spades. If people hear those, they can discuss whether the tempi are slow or fast, but in this case, it is such an unusual work, they don’t know.

MB: Which gives you a certain freedom, I suppose. There are fewer expectations; there is no real performing tradition.

AP: Yes, we can follow the types of voices we have, the characters on stage. What is really difficult to do is to make people realise that this is comedy. When you hear a Rossini overture, you know this is going to be comicIn this opera, so many moments do not sound comic; they sound desperate.

MB: There is sadness?

AP: Yes, it’s interesting, but it is part of the score. At the ends of the second and fourth acts in the score – though we are performing it just in two acts – there are beautiful scenes, these characters, this teacher, this is really comic. We need to show this, to make it funny.

MB: Have you discussed that with the director?

AP: Yes, Francesca realises this. And the costumes too, they really help with this. And I have to find a way through the music to show the comic side, to show the orchestra this.

MB: And to show the audience that the players are enjoying themselves.

AP: Of course: that’s very important. But they need to sound beautiful, and support the voices; they need to be light enough to do that.

MB: This all, I suppose, stands quite distinct from the ideas many people have of Tchaikovsky: sadness and tragedy. They are used to the symphonies, Onegin, and so on, and this will show another side to him, at least in part.

AP: Destiny, they know from the symphonies.

MB: Fate, which is always there, which suffocates.

AP: You know how important that is in the symphonies. It is always there. Perhaps you need to kill somebody or yourself. Lensky should die; Hermann should die...

MB: Everyone should die. It would be better if they had never been born – just as in Greek tragedy.

AP: Yes, exactly. And Mazeppa should die too. This is different, though, and so new to everyone. I was looking in a very big dictionary in the Covent Garden shop, there are more than a thousand operas, and there are only Onegin, The Queen of Spades, and Mazeppa, and that’s it. All these operas, the history of productions, but only three by Tchaikovsky, no Cherevichki at all, or operas like The Maid of Orleans. Cherevichki is a fantastic opera, though, and Tchaikovsky started his conductor’s career with it. It was his first ever conducting experience.

MB: And the father of someone rather famous took part in that performance, didn’t he? Fyodor Stravinsky, Igor’s father, as His Highness, the minister.

AP: That’s right. Historically, these first casts, it can be very strange: when Onegin was first performed, we don’t know who everyone was. We know that four professors from the Moscow Conservatory were in the orchestra, but not all the singers. And it was an extremely small orchestra then, a student production really. But in general, he knew what he wanted, and he had larger orchestras in the big theatres.

MB: The work itself, have you conducted it elsewhere?

AP: No, it is my first time. Unfortunately, even in Russia, it is not very often done. There is only one production, I think, at the moment, in Moscow, which I tried to see, but I haven’t been able to yet.

MB: Is that at the Bolshoi?

AP: No, not even there.

MB: It’s the sort of thing you might have thought Gergiev would have got round to doing, but even he hasn’t then?

AP: No, though he does so much: all repertoire, all composers. He does Glinka and everything onwards.

MB: Even Rubinstein’s The Demon recently, which he brought to London with the Mariinsky, though I couldn’t go. Going back to Cherevichki, there is ballet too, of course, so this is quite a rare opportunity for the Royal Ballet and the Royal Opera to perform together.

AP: Which is quite strange for me, because this is how it ought to be; there is a beautiful ballet and a beautiful orchestra, and they should go together. Tchaikovsky wrote some numbers especially for the ballet, but this is not unique. There is a gopak in Mazeppa; the polonaise is a dance too, of course.

MB: As in Onegin.

AP: Yes. He creates dances in all of his operas; so much of his music is dance.

MB: Even in the symphonies, those waltzes.

AP: Exactly. It is such a pleasure here to see beautiful dancing and the choreography is wonderful, really interesting. What is really interesting for me is that we have started to use not only the music written for dance but some of the other music too.

MB: If you have the ballet dancers, you want to use them.

AP: Of course. And this is very typical of Russian operas. You know [Rimsky-Korsakov’s] Sadko? That sort of thing: it is fantastic.

MB: Like The Tale of Tsar Saltan, which the Mariinsky brought a little while ago to Sadler’s Wells.

AP: And there all of these operas by Rimsky-Korsakov. I remember a story I heard about Solti. Somebody asked him about which operas he had conducted, what he wanted to conduct, and he said that he had only scratched the surface. You go to the dictionaries, and there are hundreds and hundreds of operas, thousands and thousands, all in the libraries, covered in dust, like that of the Mariinsky Theatre. Many of these works, commissioned by the Mariinsky, they have only been performed one. Now we wait for them to be rediscovered.

MB: And rediscovery can be such an extraordinary thing, can’t it?

AP: Very exciting.

MB: When one thinks that Monteverdi’s operas had to wait three centuries to be performed once again – let alone those that have been lost, though who knows whether they might turn up in the libraries? And these are some of the greatest operas in the entire repertoire.

AP: That’s true. And I really enjoy Baroque music. I have a lot of experience with this music, in Russia, and here, with the English Chamber Orchestra and the Irish Chamber Orchestra. But the style: it has changed so much. If you go to a recording by Furtwängler, with nine desks of first violins, six desks of double basses in a Handel concerto grosso, that sounds wonderful. Now we hear people play on old instruments, with four desks of violins; it sounds completely different. But I very much enjoy this music; for me it seems to speak to the soul. Like all music, of course. Sometimes you can hear just a phrase [he sings a descending minor third] and everyone knows that it is sad. There is no explaining.

MB: Just feeling?

AP: Yes, just feeling. In music, all of us, all over the world, are in the same place. And the notes, whoever is playing them, are in the same place in the score, of course. This brings us together. It is an international language.

[Technical incompetence on my part ensured that two or three minutes went unrecorded but, during this time, we returned to Russia, first to Gogol, his story Christmas Eve being the source both for Cherevichki itself, and as Mr Polianichko pointed out, Rimsky’s Christmas Eve too, a subject to which we returned later on.]

AP: Ah, now the tape will have missed how to make the soup I told you about, the soup in the opera: it needs everything you can throw into it, dried fruit, apples, lots of vodka, and then you put it into the oven, keep it in a warm place.

MB: What about the women in the opera? Many people have said that Tchaikovsky has a rather one-sided view of female characters.

AP: Yes, but you need to remember, when all these people come up to Solokha, she is not a real witch to them, but she is a witch. There are many different characters in this opera, like the schoolteacher, and all of them like to be as close to her as possible, because you can feel a relationship between her and all of them. The orchestra is such an important voice; you can feel that someone is really in love. It is a magical score. We have to follow the characters and find the right expression for them.

MB: It sounds from what you have said as though the rehearsals are going very well.

AP: Yes, we have had two very enjoyable weeks; everyone has worked very hard. And now, Francesca continues her work after every rehearsal. She makes many notes, concerning how things can be made better, and so on.

MB: In something like this, you will never be finished. There will always be alterations, improvements, changes to make things fresh.

AP: Very much. If there are ten performances, then the best will be the eleventh. It’s always better, better, better, better ... Every time we take the stage, there are new details to bring out.

MB: The experience of the earlier performances comes into the later ones, and the desire to do something new.

AP: Yes, of course. You try to collect all the pieces of information, all the details, to concentrate on the characters, on beautiful singing, because there are so many wonderful arias. And what’s really interesting – again this is in the Russian tradition – is that there is joy and sorrow, sadness.

MB: Two sides of the same coin?

AP: One could not exist without the other. You can’t feel joy if you don’t feel sorrow. The end of this opera, act number four, it is just crying. Solokha and Oxana are sure that Vakula is dead. Mother and daughter: they are both in distress. The sadness that you hear in all Russian opera, and also the joy; think of Borodin’s Prince Igor. Mussorgsky too.

MB: Perhaps a little less of the joy in Mussorgsky?

AP: Mussorgsky was a genius. He used this contrast better than anybody. If you remember Boris Godunov, we have just heard a song about a mosquito [the ‘Song of the Gnat’] and suddenly – Boris Godunov...

MB: A musical shadow falls, as well as that of the character on stage.

AP: Exactly. Mussorgsky was a real genius. You know, he was also setting Gogol, in Sorochintsï Fair. It’s the same story, written in 1832. He was born in 1809 and was just 23. And everybody knew this: it was so popular. Rimsky-Korsakov: his Christmas Eve, from the same place. And I’ll tell you what the difference is between Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, and Tchaikovsky. Tchaikovsky used a librettist; his is written by [Yakov] Polonsky, and it is written in Russian. But Rimsky-Korsakov and Mussorgsky create their own librettos and use the original text. Polonsky’s libretto is in general, Russian, with just a few sentences from the original text, just a few words. And it’s a pity, because you lose some of the meaning of these words. It’s not all ‘correct’ Russian pronunciation, because south of Russia, a ‘g’ sound does not exist; it is always ‘h’. It is like in Bayreuth, in the south of Germany, it is very different from the north. The same in Czech: Janáček’s pronunciation.

MB: Very different in Moravia from in Prague.

AP: Yes, yes. So the sounds are very different, and this can be another comic side to the opera.

MB: Rather like the Viennese dialect in Rosenkavalier?

AP: Yes, that’s right. This is another thing to bring out. Of course you want to show the beauty of the score, but there are so many things to consider.

MB: The very essence of opera.

On which note, I thanked Mr Polianichko very much for his time and said how much I was looking forward to the first night, on 20 November.

For further details on The Tsarina's Slippers, and to book, click here.