Eugene Onegin, Royal Opera House, review: Great singing saves Kasper Holten's misconceived production

Kasper Holten’s impending departure from his post as Director of Opera at Covent Garden means that this revival of his production of Onegin is effectively his swansong, and it exemplifies the left-field inventiveness which has been both his strength and his weakness.

Here the cast has to negotiate some astonishingly silly and counter-productive dramatic devices. Holten shadows the protagonists with alter-ego dancers, thus dissipating the duets between Madame Larina (Diana Montague) and the nurse Filipyevna (Catherine Wyn-Rogers), and between Filipyevna and Tatyana (Nicole Car); thus is Tatyana’s sublime letter-scene soliloquy destroyed because she is not alone. The duel is a farce, and Lensky’s dead body lies front-of-stage throughout the entire second half.

Yet apart from a disappointing performance by Ferruccio Furlanetto as Prince Gremin, the soloists range from good to wonderful, while chorus and orchestra evince a gloriously Russian ardour under Semyon Bychkov’s brilliant direction from the podium. Car’s passionate Tatyana has a bright and silvery purity, while Michael Fabiano’s heartrending Lensky is out of this world: the protracted first-night applause after his climactic aria testified to the flawless beauty of his sound. Dmitri Hvorostovsky’s Onegin was noble but restrained: he was taking a break from therapy for a brain tumour, and we wish him a speedy recovery.