Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky: Eugene Onégin

Six years after Eugene Onégin last graced Belfast’s Grand Opera House, Northern Ireland’s opera-loving public is reunited with Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s most celebrated opera—and in some style. In 2018 it was a Scottish National Opera production, though steered by guest director and former Northern Ireland Opera supremo Oliver Mears.

Last time around a living breathing horse and steaming samovars conjured a rural Russia idyll of some opulence. By contrast, NI Opera director Cameron Menzies places the story, based on Alexander Pushkin’s novel in verse, in a large but shabby country house of faded bourgeoisie glory, created by set designer Niall McKeever. Peeling paintwork, a giant mirror stained with age, dusty books, forlorn-looking furniture, and a static wall-mounted fan seem to speak to post-Communist-era decline. Otherwise, the lavish costumes, peasant customs and dueling pistols remain faithful to 19th century Russia. This production adheres to the original Russian language.

Eugene Onégin’s lack of spectacle—the fatal duel aside— is more than compensated for by Tchaikovsky’s magnificent score, confidently interpreted by the debuting Orchestra of Northern Ireland Opera. Drawn from musicians across the island, this initiative, foreshadowed by NI Opera’s Covid-era production of Puccini’s La Bohème in 2021, offers a more level playing field for classically trained musicians who might wait in vain for years for a seat in a professional orchestra. Under the baton of Dominic Limburg the ONIO excels, embracing the score’s more grandiose contours with energy, and investing the aching emotional peaks and troughs with the requisite sympathetic touch.

But before a single note sounds, the wheelchair-bound figure of Old Tatyana (Anne Flanagan) signals the essential yet unreliable role of memory in all our lives—painfully acute at times, frustratingly elusive at others. Making her NI Opera debut, Flanagan commands the attention with a performance of Beckettian humanity—familiar yet unsettling—as she grapples with memories of her youth both seductive and cruelly haunting.

Baritone Yuriy Yurchuk in the title role, tenor Norman Reinhardt as Vladimir Lensky and mezzo-soprano Sarah Richmond as Olga give fine performances in the leads, while mezzo-soprano Carolyn Dobbin as Madame Larina, mezzo-soprano Jenny Bourke (brilliant in NI Opera’s winter production of Philip Glass’ and Robert Moran’s The Juniper Tree) as Filipevna, tenor Aaron O’Hare as an entertaining Monsieur Triquet and baritone Niall Anderson as Prince Gremin also impress.

But it is mezzo-soprano Mary McCabe in the role of Tatyana who steals the day. Equally convincing as the love-struck maiden besotted with the dashing Onégin and then as the conflicted but resolutely faithful married woman who refuses his later advances, her near fifteen-minute recital as she pens a love letter to Onégin in Act 1, one of opera’s great emotive solos, is worth the price of admission alone.

In a libretto largely devoid of excitement, at least by opera’s sometimes far-fetched heights, some might argue that the real star of the show is Tchaikovsky’s score. The chorus pieces, the ballet and ballroom waltz, which inject passion and brio, are all artfully choreographed by movement director Jennifer Rooney, with the contrasts between pagan countryside rituals and high-society sophistication most striking. Costume designer Gillian Lennox must have had a ball (and a lot of long days) in creating such a plethora of elegant gowns and frocks.

In the final, stirring scene, as Onégin crumples heartbroken to the floor in the face of Tatyana’s rejection, and as the ever-present figure of Old Tatyana looks on, thoughts of what might have been in earlier times must surely torture all three protagonists. But it is too late. Time has marched on, leaving bereavement, regrets and fading memories in its wake. “Where are they now, those golden days of my youth?”

Northern Ireland Opera’s stylish production of Eugene Onégin is full of passion, beauty and longing, much like Tchaikovsky’s timeless score.