Yevgény Onyégin

One of the challenges of having once been an on-stage opera singer and actor is that it becomes difficult to engage in opera performances as a spectator; the task is even more difficult when the performance is a "concert version" (without costumes, sets, or acting) of the opera. Thus was my challenge Monday evening when we went to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts to see the National Symphony Orchestra to see their concert presentation of Tchaikovsky's major opera, Eugene Onegin.

Onegin is not one of the "old warhorses" perpetually done by American opera companies. There are not any whistleable tunes or familiar melodies from some movie, although Tatiana's "Letter Aria" is often done by operatic sopranos in recitals. Most American audiences are not that familiar with the opera; I, however, am. The very last opera I prepared in my limited "career," just before moving to Washington, D.C., was, in fact, Eugene Onegin.

So, off to the concert hall we went. My lawyer friend Jim, who was in his long-distant youth a violinist, accompanied me (much to the disappointment and jealousy of his lady, who was left home alone). We sat on the right side of the house on row S, which is about halfway back, a place where there's usually a good sound blend.

Musical forces were provided by the National Symphony under the baton of soon-to-be retired music director Leonard Slatkin with choral music by The Washington Chorus under the direction of Julian Wachner. The soloists were almost all young Russians.

From the first phrase of the overture, I knew we were in trouble. The NSO has some amazing musicians; there have been times I've heard them and felt it was a transcendent experience; this was not one of those nights. As I have oft bemoaned over the past few years, the orchestra frequently doesn't play well at all for Slatkin. They were languid, even sloppy in their playing. It lacked care, cohesion, and crispness.

Once we finally got to hear the chorus, I was disappointed with them, too. It was a very static, sterile, "park and bark" effort with no sense of drama. And, what's worse, the diction was woefully lacking. Now, Russian is a very difficult language to sing. Russian words have a tendency to start with like a dozen consonants, all of which have to be voiced, and I know from having sung Onegin before that many of those consonant strings are on sixteenth notes at quarter note=144. So, it's not easy. But, all I was hearing from the chorus was a wash of vowel sound, with very, very little consonant expression at all.

The young women soloists were quite fine. Irina Mataeva, clad in a simple, white satin, A-line dress, sang the leading role as Tatiana. She's at the age where she can still play the ingenue credibly, and where she has the maturity and power to sing dramatically when needed. Ekaterina Semenchuk sang the role of her younger sister Olga with a tomboyish playfulness, emphasized all the more by the role's mezzo-soprano tessitura.

I was somewhat more critical of the men. The poet Lensky was sung by the young Daniil Shtoda from the Mariinsky Academy in St. Petersburg. While he had nice vocal sensitivity and a sense of drama, I thought his voice sounded rather constricted and lacked volume and power. He's only about thirty years old—considered "young" for a tenor—so perhaps his power will improve as he matures.

On the other hand, Sergei Leiferkus as the title character had just the opposite problem. Leiferkus has been a major performer for probably thirty years, and his baritone is now more suited to mature roles like Germont pere in La Traviata than to younger, vibrant characters like Onegin. When Leiferkus and Shtoda made their stage entrance together, I was confused at first; Onegin and Lensky are supposed to be good friends; while a little age difference between Russian male friends isn't unusual, when these two men entered, it looked like father and son, if not grandfather and grandson. Later when Leiferkus sang his meeting scene with Mataeva, he had to sing some of the higher notes in falsetto. Even Jim commented at the interval that with Leiferkus's interpretation, Onegin must be a "jerk" and was not a sympathetic, troubled figure at all—that makes it very difficult for the opera to meet its mark at the end of the opera, when the abandoned Onegin must be a tragic figure that garners the audience's pathos.

Local character tenor Robert Baker came out in a white dinner jacket and made quite a favorable impression in his turn as the French poet Triquet. His serio-comic performance gave the concert a much-needed breath of fresh air.

Other soloists included Irina Tchistjakova as Tatiana's mother's Larina, Mzia Nioradze as the nanny Filipyevna, Gustav Andreassen as Prince Gremin, Nathan Herfindahl as the captain, and Grigory Soloviov as Zaretsky.

And, thus went Eugene Onegin. I should have known better than to go to a three hour-long concert opera, especially in a language I don't speak, and especially without any big name stars to make the evening interesting.