There was a new conductor, and a Russian, Timur Zangiev. Not having seen this production when it was new in the 2013-14 season, I cannot be sure that the sound world of this revival was not already an aspiration then; but it is hard to reconcile it with the predilections of its original conductor, Valery Gergiev. Perhaps it was simply Zangiev’s conception of the piece, or his calculation of how it might best work with the singers engaged, or possibly the pursuit of an historical precedent, which I’ll discuss in a moment. It is intriguing to note that two singers originally announced for the production did not appear: Igor Golovatenko as Onegin and Stephanie Blythe as Filippyevna. Golovatenko I first heard as a vocally suave but slightly undervoiced Yeletsky in the Queen of Spades that saw Lise Davidsen’s debut. But more recently he has emerged in very different form as, first, the Carlo of Mariusz Trelinski’s Forza del destino, and this season as Gérard in Andrea Chénier, whose short run I was sorry to miss. He and Blythe, in her late-career bari-contralto mode, would have burst the frame of this performance, of which my notes read in part “Overall very subdued, conductor holding way down while intimate stuff is sung by modest voices, as if a studio performance.”

Onegin began as, in effect, a studio performance, at Moscow’s Maly Theatre (1879), sung by students of the Moscow Conservatory. Tchaikovsky did not intend it for the grand opera stage. He said he wanted it to remain free of “obtrusive stage effects [trans.: ‘production’] and pomposity,” and named his selection from Pushkin’s poem “lyrical scenes,” rather than “opera.”  It was soon taken up by the Bolshoi (with the composer very much involved in the rehearsals) and other grand opera venues, but in 1922 it returned to studio conditions with the production directed by Constantin Stanislavski in the Opera Studio of the Bolshoi Theatre, presented in the columned second-floor ballroom of the old house the Soviet government had granted him as residence and working space. The preparation of this presentation, meticulously rehearsed according to Stanislavski’s system of exercises and character study as applied to operatic material, is recounted in detail in Stanislavski on Opera by the baritone Pavel Rumyantsev, who sang the title role in the production and took extensive day-to-day notes on the process. ^(I) The little production seems to have had considerable impact on how the opera was viewed, at least in Moscow. On a hunch, I went back to Onegin‘s first complete recording, made by the forces of the Bolshoi in 1936, when some of those involved had no doubt seen the Opera Studio production and all must at least have heard tell of it.