Tchaikovsky - Eugene (Yevgeny) Onegin

La Monnaie, Brussels, Sunday February 5 2023

Conductor: Alain Altinoglu. Production and Costumes: Laurent Pelly. Sets: Massimo Troncanetti. Lighting: Marco Giusti. Larina: Bernadetta Grabias. Tatiana: Sally Matthews. Olga: Lilly Jorstad. Filippyevna: Cristina Melis. Onegin: Stéphane Degout. Lensky: Bogdan Volkov. Gremin: Nicolas Courjal. Petrovich: Kris Belligh. Zaretsky: Kamil Ben Hsaïn Lachiri. Triquet: Christophe Mortagne. Guillot: Jérôme Jacob-Paquay. Precentor: Hwanjoo Chung. La Monnaie Orchestra and Chorus.

Photos: Forster, La Monnaie

Two Pelly productions in a row: after a youthful Le Voyage dans la Lune at the Opéra Comique on Friday, Eugene Onegin in Brussels on Sunday. But before writing about the production, I want to plunge straight in with a paean of praise for Stéphane Degout. Pardon me, in advance, for the laboured, purple prose; sometimes I find the going tough. I don't know how the professionals do it.

This was, so I read, Degout's role début as Onegin and he was fabulous. Describing a voice is always hard; we resort to a vocabulary of colours, materials, instruments and other sounds that never really do the trick - which is why I tend to wriggle out, keeping it short and hoping nobody will notice. If this post is late, it's because I've been wondering how to go about describing perfection. What can you say, other than that every aspect of the performance, vocally and theatrically was, well... perfect? At this stage in his career, Degout is really a ‘Goldilocks’ performer. Everything is just right. His voice is satisfyingly complex: it has clarity and an interesting grain, but also body, resonance, warmth and depth. His phrasing, colouring, beautifully modulated dynamics and sentiment sound fluent, natural, frank and sincere. He acts with his voice as much as his gestures; every inflection or move is nicely judged, intelligently matched to music and text.  He has stature, authority, presence. As I said only the other night over dinner to a distinguished harpist, only in this case with regard to Degout singing Rameau: if Rameau were always so well sung, we wouldn’t need to listen to anything else. Are singers of this rare kind expectionally gifted or exceptionally hardworking? Both, I suppose. It's a privilege to see and hear him, and at the moment I can't think of another male singer working at quite this level, though Tézier comes very near.

Fortunately, Degout's colleagues on stage weren't far behind.

First impressions are wickedly tenacious. When I saw Sally Matthews twelve years ago in Mozart,  I found her cool, dry and somewhat strait-laced. Looking back through this blog I see that, by the time of La Monnaie's production of Daphne, in 2014, I was finding her voice darker and fuller. In 2016, in the same company's Capriccio  it was 'strong and straight, rich in timbre' and with just the right ('Goldilocks' again) degree of vibrato. Yet these positive developments hadn't sunk in, possibly because neither performance took place in ideal circumstances: in Daphne, the wide-open set gave no help in projecting sound into the house, and Capriccio took place in La Monnaie’s awful temporary big top for 'that least spectacular, least circus-like of operas,' as I wrote at the time, with jets from Brussels airport roaring overhead. Fortunately; the penny has at last dropped, perhaps in part because Massimo Troncanetti's sets for Onegin actually did provide 'sounding boards', for the famous letter scene at least (see below). But sounding boards or not, Sally Matthews' Tatiana was faultless.

Bogdan Volkov has a clear, sweet, lyrical voice that felt a bit short on body at the start, but by the time of 'Kuda, kuda' he'd found his footing and gave a beautiful performance of what I recently saw described as one of the top ten tenor arias in the repertoire. Nicolas Courjal was as good a Gremin as you might expect, a bit younger and more vigorous-looking and -sounding than usual. Christophe Mortagne on the other hand, an engaging, comical Triquet, looked and sounded as ancient and doddering as any Triquet you've ever seen. There were no weak links in the cast: even Petrovich was quite striking, and the orchestra and chorus were on form, as now usual, under Altinoglu, who took a restrained, Mozartian approach, having explained in the programme that Tchaikovsky wasn't really keen on Wagnerian tub-thumping and score Onegin for a perfectly reasonably-sized opera orchestra.

 

Laurent Pelly has a gift for directing comic works. His track record in more serious ones has been, to my mind (and I know I'm not alone) less obviously successful, but not this time. This was a simple staging - in fact, as near to a semi-staging as staged opera could be, allowing us to focus on the singers as they played out the characters' frustrations in near isolation. Less is more, as the saying goes. The set in the first two acts was no more than a large, raised square of rustic parquet on the darkened stage with, at the beginning, just four chairs for the women on stage. Lensky and Onegin emerged ominously from the gloom at the rear. The parquet platform could rotate, and fold like origami to make a rear wall which then split and folded again, vertically, into two panels, forming an enclosed space. In Tatiana's letter scene, these walls slowly and symbolically closed in on her (and incidentally, as I mentioned above, provided a useful caisse de résonance; if only more directors realised how helpful flat can be and how unhelpful, en revanche, their bare, wide-open stages are). The chorus milled around the platform after the harvest, and crowded on to it when it was a dance floor. Later, for the duel, it tilted and pointed up into the house like the prow of ship, for Lensky to sing his lovely aria (this reminded me, incongruously, of Francesca Zambello's production of Billy Budd, at the Bastille long ago). With such a simple set, lighting became a protagonist: like Tatiana's bedroom walls, spotlights shrank to hem characters in.

Crowd movements were well managed, as usual with Pelly: choreographed is more the word. Costumes were timeless, impossible to date precisely though from somewhere between, say, 1880 and 1955 (!), in faded pastels until Tatiana finally appeared in act three in fuchsia satin with a white fur stole.

 

The act three set was in stark contrast to its forerunners: a treacly black staircase (I thought back to Svoboda) and suspended globe lights. I could understand the contrast, but found the result relatively ugly. It might have been more effective, and more in harmony with the previous acts, to transform the same parquet into stairs, run a broad red carpet up them, and hang half a dozen glittering crystal chandeliers overhead. But that's just me, and nobody could complain about one ugly set when, overall, the production and cast were so good - even, it has to be said, at a Sunday matinee for old folks: we aren't always so lucky!