Barry Kosky's Tchaikovsky: Eugene Onegin at the Zurich Opera house. A review in the form of notes.

Curtain rises, beginning: the two women are frozen, they are a photograph. They then begin moving when the music changes, they are now a memory. They are dressed in black, and there is a haze on the stage. They are singing of the past. Complacent, quaint, but ever so forlorn. The two women, sung by Liliana Nikiteanu and Margerita Nekrasova, sing beautifully a sad song with folk twang. The lower voice is so earthy it sounds – how do I describe this – like a woolen muff has been dipped in wine and squeezed into sound. They sing of men – men who are deceitful in life, but who become somehow saintly in their passing. My mother says my grandmother did the same hagiographic nattering about a husband she couldn't bear until he died, whereupon he could do no wrong. Ahh, the passage of time.

The overture: The grace of strings starts high, swings left, right, down, a falling leaf. This is Tchaikovsky. A falling line restarts higher each time, climaxing via increasing descent. Clarinets and then French horns announce an excitement: enough of routine, here comes an undulation! The excitement turns sober. Back to the lilting, swinging strings. Left, then right.

The chorus begins. The costumes make sense for a picnic, but when they begin singing of their labours it is hard to imagine how a scene that evokes Seurat could possibly portray the burdens of the wheat fields. Zürich’s opera chorus has a problem with entrances, despite clear and big conducting by Stanislav Kochanovsky. Are they under-rehearsed, or amateur? The women sound worse than the men. I find this music gorgeous, but that may just be my weakness for anything unfamiliar and grand; for anything sentimental and pre-Soviet. The chorus will regularly get lost in a mix; does stage director Barry Kosky not know the effect their spatial ambling will have on the cohesion of the music?

The central disk of the stage spins. Why? Because they paid for their spinning stage, and they’re going to get their goddamn money’s worth, that’s why. At times, it works – the spinning helps differentiate the crowd from the one character upstage – the whirling world is apart from Tatjana’s dreamy longing. (Werther had an even better idea: build a set like a dollhouse, and have Juan Diego Florez enter downstage of it, framed by nothing but darkness and Massenet’s best music.) The spinning chorus playing badminton was worse than distracting. The singing suffered, the Russian diction suffered, the actions mismatched the singing, and the rhythmic beat of the music fought with the eye tracing a birdie back and forth.

Other spinning happens for other transitions: Lensky spends a night in anguish, and a rotation of ruminating leaves him no less hopeless than before. When Onegin flirts with Lensky’s Olga, the stage is spinning for the dance. (Could the mere hubbub here be expanded to make Onegin seem dirtier, and Lensky more wretched?)

There’s a time when Kosky brilliantly stops the spinning; indeed, he stops just about everything but the orchestra itself: The music and text of Act 2 call for yet another dance, and instead of showing this dance, the permagreen stage is voided but for chairs. Kosky leaves Tatjana alone; any spinning is between the orchestra and her head. She sings of dancing, but sits still. The trick pulled off here is to steal time from the story, which is so simple it barely needs telling anyway, and to devote it to a depiction (really a musical telling) of a character’s inner thoughts. Kosky knows here just how much more less is. Given opera’s visual gluttony I’m not sure why more productions don’t find a balance like this, between too lavish and too austere.

Photo Credit: Opernhaus Zürich

The peasants are so happy you would think this was a Donizetti comedy. Is this Pushkin’s fault, Tchaikovsky’s, Kosky’s, or no one’s? The opera premiered in 1879. Not far from that time Tolstoy wrote a short story about peasants so desperate, and so religious, that they weighed the immorality of murdering their lord against the impossibility of their agony. But Kosky's/Tchaikovsky's/Pushkin's serfs are doing so well that they sing about raw skin on their hands from labour while playing badminton and shielding said skin via parasols. Penury? Pish posh!

The costumes, by Klaus Bruns, are a lovely mixture of not-too-bright pastels, and when mixed with the gorgeous lush grass of the stage, and the handsome trees that give the deep upstage a real dimension, they paint a scene of framed memory. Your mind’s eye remembers your own family gatherings – those ones from even longer ago, from when you were especially young, where there was an especially vast assemblage of cousins and neighbours – with colours that are simplified like these ones. An Easter egg hunt, and those eggs are transformed in memory to Faberge. Again with the colours, Kosky and his team have the good idea to pair the marvelous bareness of this Pushkin story with a finiteness of visual stimulation. There is so little to look at, and the colours are so affectionately simple, that your attention is poured easily into the characters' interior.

These characters are painted even more broadly than Rebecca Ringst’s set. They speak in platitudes, and they announce their connundra within seconds of telling us their name. When Tchaikovsky wants us to know that the character of Olga is carefree and exuberant, he does so by having her sing “I am carefree, and exuberant!” This may make admirers of Pushkin’s poetry wince, as his verse is turned into clumsy, quick lyrics. I’m not so perturbed. The music is just tortured enough, just dignified enough, just strange enough to my non-Russian ear, and always so psychologically pointed, that it is gorgeous. The story's simple characterisations allow for a tableau of identities to be positioned lovingly on a stage. It’s not Ibsen’s dialogue, five acts have been wedged into three, but the music does the job.

Kosky’s best strength is finding a set that knows this – his productions are often exquisite in they way they frame an opera’s emotion spatially/visually, and then in doing so give the music the deference it needs to fill that frame.