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| | Arts Calendar / May 5 / Opera |
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Lyric Scenes performed with one interval. Libretto by Pyotr Tchaikovsky and Konstantin Shilovsky based on Alexander Pushkin’s novel in verses of the same name. Music Director: Alexander Vedernikov. Stage Director: Dmitri Tcherniakov. Chorus Master: Valery Borisov. The Bolshoi’s dancers have departed, to be replaced by its opera company for just four performances. Yet there’s real quality if not quantity here — for Dmitri Tcherniakov’s staging of Eugene Onegin is exceptional. It’s unquestionably the most compelling version of Tchaikovsky’s masterpiece to be seen in these islands since Graham Vick’s unforgettable Glyndebourne production more than a decade and a half ago. Tcherniakov has rethought the drama, creating a time-travelling naturalism that is profoundly subversive, with everything pushed to neurotic extremes. The entire opera is set indoors: in a reception room of the Larin’s house just before the revolution for the first two acts, and in Gremin’s gaudy St Petersburg equivalent in the 1960s for the last. Dinner parties dominate the first and third acts, while even in the second dancing is kept to a minimum, and the duel never happens; Lensky dies accidentally, during an argument with Onegin over a shotgun.
Bolshoi Theater New Stage  |
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