And things picked up during the second act.  Again, I focused on the music mainly and found Valery Gergiev’s wonderful conducting.  True, the singers were sometimes behind the music, but honestly I blame the singers for that.  The pace was a brisk andante and Tchaikovsky’s music soared and was emoting for the singers, who I thought really could use the help.  Anna Netrebko is a terrific actress, but the night we saw her I felt she was just going through the motions vocally.  I was surprised; when we saw her in Elixir she was magnificent!  Perhaps she was hungry.  She was looking thinner than usual.

 

Considering the level of hysteria surrounding Anna Netrebko, I always find something subdued about her performances. (I have seen her in Anna Bolena, Elisir and now Eugene Onegin.)   It may be the inflated expectations I get in spite of myself due to her fame, hysterical fan base and omnipresent image, but I have always felt something lacking when I see her perform.  A gap between the expectation and the actual execution.  Not to say that she is bad, in many ways she is excellent.  But I have not found her to be as riveting as one would expect from her fame and the fanfare surrounding her every move.  But again this could be due to my own inflated expectations.  I go in with the assumption I should be and will be absolutely wowed and blown away.

Mariusz Kwiecien we saw at the Met last year in Elisir with Netrebko.  I also saw him in Don Giovanni the previous year but I don’t remember that performance well.  It was my second date with my now fiancée and I was terribly distracted.   But I liked him very much in Eugene Onegin.  He was the best thing about it for me.  He is handsome and very much a stage creature.  He can crouch, kneel, move, run, slink–which is sadly not the norm in opera even today. Vocally he is not wildly electric but I am trying to not expect that anymore in the current opera scene.  But he is engrossing, believable and exciting enough.

I really loved Tchaikovsky’s music.  Valery Gergiev and the Met orchestra were exceptional and kept me swept up in the action even during the very long and backstory heavy first act.

The production was lush enough. The Act Two set for the duel was especially effective and as hauntingly atmospheric a set as I have seen at the Met.  I hated the Act Three set however.  The downstage columns served to break the stage action in half.  Downstage there were muddled clumps of action and upstage beyond the columns aimless wandering gaggles of people seemingly unconnected to action downstage.  It worked slightly better in the final scene with only Tatiana and Onegin downstage.

I also have a question about the staging of the letter aria in Act One.  Netrebko discards three sheets of paper after writing two lines on each in the first two thirds of the aria.  Presumably they are rejected rough drafts of the opening lines of the love letter.  But then at the climax she writes two lines on a fresh sheet of paper and exclaims she is finally done.  So the letter is only two lines long?  Onegin has an astonishingly large amount to say about the letter if it’s only two lines.

Speaking of Eugene Onegin himself, I never cease to be surprised just how many titular opera characters are true malignant narcissists.  More on this at another time.

We were at the second performance of the season for Eugene Onegin and there were no protestors I could see or hear outside the met.  Nor inside.  There seemed to be a moment as the lights went down that the audience braced for some kind of outburst but none came.  Perhaps Peter Gelb’s reported rainbow suspenders at the Met Opening assuaged some of the outrage.