Sara Krulwich/The New York Times
Anna Netrebko and Mariusz Kwiecien rehearsed “Eugene Onegin” at the Metropolitan Opera.
By tradition the gala opening night of a Metropolitan Opera season is a fashionable and pricey affair. But during his tenure as general manager of the company Peter Gelb has also made opening night a statement of artistic purpose, as it was on Monday when the Met opened the season with a new production of Tchaikovsky’s “Eugene Onegin,” a landmark Russian opera based on the novel in verse by Pushkin.
The production, directed by Deborah Warner (though there are some complications to this story), starred the appealing Polish baritone Mariusz Kwiecien as the dashing but aloof Onegin, a bored aristocrat; the glamorous Russian soprano Anna Netrebko as Tatiana, the bookish young dreamer who falls impulsively for Onegin; and the Russian maestro Valery Gergiev conducting an insightful and rhapsodic, if sometimes untidy, account of Tchaikovsky’s great score.
Opening nights under Mr. Gelb have also become a gift to the people of New York. The performance was broadcast live on a huge outdoor video screen to an audience that packed Lincoln Center Plaza and was also shown on video in Times Square.
But, as things turned out, Mr. Gelb felt compelled to make an unanticipated statement on this opening night. For weeks, an online petition had been gathering signatures (about 10,000 to date) calling for the Met to dedicate opening night to the support of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people as a protest of the punitive law in Russia signed this June by President Vladimir V. Putin banning all “propaganda on nontraditional sexual relationships.” As the head of the storied Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg, Mr. Gergiev has received crucial support from Mr. Putin and the government. He and Ms. Netrebko, longtime colleagues, were open advocates for Mr. Putin’s election last year.
In addition, a contingent of about three dozens protesters organized by the activist group Queer Nation stood near Lincoln Center Plaza on Monday calling on Mr. Gergiev and Ms. Netrebko to speak up against Mr. Putin’s antigay policies. And in the house, just before the start of the opera, some activists sitting in the Family Circle shouted “Putin, end your war on Russian gays” and more. After a couple of minutes the demonstrators were led out and the opera proceeded without interference.
The opening night program book contained an insert by Mr. Gelb, a copy of a statement published on Monday by Bloomberg News, in which, while deploring the “tyranny of Russian’s new antigay laws,” he explains why it would be inappropriate for the Met to dedicate a particular performance to any special social or political cause. It has been terrible to see the rights of gay people in Russian trampled upon. Still, to make the Met the target of this call for action seems not entirely fair. If opera lovers, activists and journalists want to press Mr. Gergiev for his position on Mr. Putin’s policies, that is their right, just as it is his right not to reply and take the consequences to his reputation. It should be remembered, though, that standing up for civil rights in Russia does not come without risk.
For now, let me put aside these difficult questions and get to the new “Eugene Onegin.”
Mr. Gelb has raised the stakes for every new production at the Met by talking up how essential it is for the art form to bring in today’s most lively and innovative directors and designers. Some of the productions on his watch have met that standard. Some have been curiously bland, or nothing special. This disappointing “Eugene Onegin” belongs among the roster of also-rans.
It replaces a 1997 production by the director Robert Carsen that was visually arresting, with an almost abstract look, full of autumnal colors and a stage floor covered with fallen tree leaves. There was one problem: the set had no real walls or ceiling to help project the voices into the house. But the production was actually bolder than the new one.
Ms. Warner’s staging, with sets by Tom Pye, is a coproduction with the English National Opera. It shifts the story’s setting from the 1820s to roughly the late 1870s, contemporaneous with the years Tchaikovsky wrote the piece. Handsome costumes of the period are designed by Chloe Obolensky.
The opening scene is typically set, as per the stage directions, in a garden of the Larin estate in the country, where we meet the sisters Tatiana and Olga and their fretful mother, Madame Larina. In this production the action takes place in what looks like a sun room that opens to a garden grove. Dingy curtains cover wall-size windows. Lots of work takes place on a country estate and this drab room looks like a real workplace, which is the problem: you get tired of it.
Olga, the strong mezzo-soprano Oksana Volkova, and Tatiana sing a wistful song together. The pensive Tatiana lives in a world of books. But vivacious Olga has a fiancée, the boyish Lenski, an aspiring poet (the excellent Polish tenor Piotr Beczala, in bright, ringing voice). Lenski arrives with his friend Onegin, who has inherited a neighboring estate from his uncle, though he has no interest in running it. Flirting with Tatiana amuses the superior Onegin. This is all it takes to unleash pent-up fantasies of romantic love in Tatiana.
Music Review: ‘Eugene Onegin’ Opens Metropolitan Opera Season
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