Yesterday was the premiere of the opera Yevgeny Onegin of Piotr Tchaikovsky in the Palau de les Arts. Due to the short time I have lately had been unable to find anything to worry about the performers, all new to me, including the new chief conductor of the orchestra of Les Arts, Meir Omer Wellber and tenor Dmitry Korchak excluding, whom who knew and expected a good performance.
Let's start with the work of Meir Omer Wellber the front of the orchestra. After considerable success with Aida, something I could not verify because the only function I attended was led by Lorin Maazel, Wellber faced one of the crowning achievements of Russian repertoire, they say, is a specialty. The first thing I noticed, confirming what many commented after Aida, is that your gestualización is excessive. I guess because the orchestra responds passing this thread and thus losing the ability to qualify properly. Still, we must recognize that its direction never fell into neglect and the sound of the orchestra was as beautiful as it used to be, with those bungee cords and such metals as accurate. Also, the choir was so good as usual. On the negative side, sometimes you descuadrados Wellber voices and the orchestra slightly and, above all, the great Polish finished third act turned into a hodgepodge report in which each section orchestra seemed to go free. I think these details can go negative in the upcoming features puliéndose and Wellber, a promising director, may evolve into better as you master the gestures and the orchestra gets used to its peculiarities.
In the voices, dominated by a correction that does not go beyond what is minimally acceptable, stressed male roles over the feminine. Artur Rucinski played the lead with an excess of coldness in the acting and singing monotonous shooting him, but his voice is as beautiful and powerful, and this enabled him to get away with. Better Dmitry Korchak was as Lenski, exceeding my expectations with a Kuda, kuda loaded sung with expressiveness and elegance, displaying a rich palette of shades. The public also liked Prince of Gremin Groissböck Günther, a bass with a beautiful voice and a good bass. The only male singer that seemed to be right below was Emilio Sanchez, a poor Triquet which certainly did not help anything excessive ridicule to which he subjected the staging.
In women, no more correct Lena Belkina as Olga, Margarita Nekrasova as Filíppievna, Helene Schneiderman as Larina and, unfortunately, also Mataeva as Tatiana Irina. In the case of the first three, the brevity of their roles makes the correction is simple enough, but the role of Tatiana requires more than simply take notes and that something else was what was missing yesterday. He did nothing wrong, of course, stay in tune and was covered by the orchestra, not invented notes or avoided the more committed now, but his singing is not sent me everything I hope that I convey a Tatiana.
And finally, the staging by Mariusz Trelinski , from the Teatr Wielki (Opera Narodowa) in Warsaw. In the first act was clear that his intention was the same as in Madama Butterfly of last season: that the scene reflects not so much places but states of mind or feelings pertaining to the psychology of the characters, and this is achieved by Sudden changes in lighting color, shadow play and the presence of recurrent scenic elements like trees or apples that appear in the first act and come back, rolling on the stage at the end of the opera. Well, what in Madama Butterfly worked perfectly, yesterday I choked for several reasons. First, the use of a character played by a mime who does the role of alter ego of Onegin, whose presence ends up being tiresome and unnecessary stress as merely platitudes which are already well defined by the music of Tchaikovsky. If we add that Trelinski, probably unaware of the English culture, makes him walk like a Chiquito de la Calzada, the end result is negative. Another reason for the fiasco is the lack of coherence of the proposal as a minimalist and elegant first act is followed by a scene of Larina's house party with an appeal to the ugliness (those green lamps, the purple background) which comes to the ridiculous when it appears Triquet become a kind of Pumuky wearing a pink frock and accompanied by three cherubs in a thong and a giant pink bulb species from which a dancer. Of course, the scene of Triquet is a tacky, but if Tchaikovsky was able to capture the character's tacky without ridicule, would not it be wiser to try to do the same? After that, he returned minimalism in an elegant and understated scene of mourning for depues fall back into the ugly and exaggerated in the third act. The party at the home of Prince Gremin opens with a kind of parade of the undead to the rhythm of the polonaise, which does not seem more appropriate and certainly is not. The atmosphere also gets it done: checkerboard floor littered with red lights, a big red arrow desdendente upstage and Tatiana turned into a kind of femme fatale who does not hit either the character or poor Mataeva Irina, who did what could. And finally, something I did not like was the placement of a walkway in front of the orchestra pit in which they place some of the scenes of more tension, as the discussion between Lenski and Onegin or the final duet. And is that beyond the aesthetic that might be closer to the public performers, singers need a stage box for your voice to be projected properly around the room and it is increasingly common for managers Scene not take this into account, making them sing from positions that do not favor them.
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