The French tenor Stanislas de Barbeyrac sang Lenski, and apart from some constriction around the passaggio early on, with pleasing tone and a poised, well-proportioned rendition of “Kuda, kuda.” But it sounded distant in the auditorium. A tenor friend reported that he came over very well on the videocast, and I can imagine that. Granted: it’s a short part with nothing like the extended challenges of Tatiana, but in a way the Gremin of Alexander Tsymbalyuk came the closest of the evening’s performances to complete success. He didn’t take over the vast space like a Tozzi or a Ghiaurov, but with his simple, nicely shaded singing of his aria made the points of music and character in manner consistent with what seemed to be the overall aim of the reading. It seemed to me that Zangiev fell into an Onegin trap, playing for mood (there’s already plenty of that) rather than action. Tchaikovsky seems to have understood that the most important actions are internal, and it’s those that must be searched out and made urgent and suspenseful in the playing. The orchestra made some lovely sounds, but sounded slack and uninvolved too much of the time. The lighter dances had good buoyancy, but the mazurka and, especially, the Polonaise, needed more thrust. The same could be said for the choreography, and I though I’m no expert on Russian folk dancing, I very much doubt that Mme. Larina’s estate saw a Peasants’ Dance in which the floor was wiped in great swirls with an unprotesting peasant maiden.

I liked some things about the visual production. Most of the behavior was of the human variety, its interactions emotionally logical, and with the comings and goings of supporting personae nicely tipped in without pulling focus. (In place of Stephanie Blythe, it was enjoyable to see Larissa Diadkova, well remembered for her fine work first for the Kirov/Maryinsky, then the Met. She used her voice very lightly, but gave us Filippyevna with a stage veteran’s easy virtuosity.) There was good atmosphere and indoor/outdoor feel within the predominantly green framework of the Act 1 set, though then for Scene 3, after a pretty projection that showed the Larin garden, Tatiana and Onegin were made to play their painful meeting indoors in the Larin house, which seems quite out of the question. A similar thing happened again in Act 2, when during the introduction to Scene 1 another projection showed us a fine  wintry setting—but for Scene 2, the Duel. The between-scene breaks were very long, inducing a yearning for either Mitropoulos’ musically redundant interludes or, perhaps, those robots. I did not understand why Lenski, Onegin, and Gremin, contrasted characters, were costumed and coiffed in uniform black, unless it was to make some feminist statement, unsupported by words or music, about the sisters in the unrelenting grip of indistinguishable males. I wondered if the downstage columns of the last scene, which made the playing out of these heightened passions a little awkward, were an homage to the Stanislavski ballroom. Rumyantsev tells that Stanislavsky wanted to leave little room for Onegin and Tatiana to act out the scene, with no big crosses or gesticulations, almost a trapped-with-each-other feel and the emotion under the highest possible pressure. I’d suppose that any St. Petersburg ballroom, especially a grand one like Gremin’s, would have columns. But it seemed an unsupportive arrangement, though Grigorian and Samoilov played it plausibly enough.