From Russia with Angst

From Russia with Angst, Thursday 3/16. [photo: Having taken a life-saving wrong turn just outside St. Petersburg, Lensky (Rolando Villazon) waits for Onegin to show up for their duel.] The weather outside was frightful and the radiators so delightful, we decided to spend the day reading and watching the boats go by. The sun never came out, the wind blew, and enough light rain came down to make us feel we made the right choice.

However, we had those opera tickets (quiet, Houn) and made a real evening out of it, going to the Amphitheater Restaurant at the opera house for dinner. First impressions weren’t perfect, as the décor was functional and the tables were faux marble with no tablecloths, and on the menu it said, “Minimum food service per person ₤18.50,” ($33). Since we had modestly priced seats, we figured it would add up in the end to the same as the top tickets without food, so we felt a bit better.

Dinner turned out very well. We paid close attention to the menu (unlike yesterday), translating into everyday English where needed, and what we ordered was delicious. Then we took a real luxury option and ordered dessert for the intermission, had coffee, and went in.

(Note on theater logistics: the Royal Opera seating capacity is 2658, only a few hundred less than the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. Their facilities for eating and drinking are miles ahead of the Pavilion. They must have had five or six venues for patrons of all classes, from the founder-types on down. The food was more than good, and they were able to serve a whole bunch of people and get them out the door in time for the performance. In the intermission they were able to serve not only desserts and sandwiches, but main courses as well. It wasn’t cheap, but it was certainly no more expensive than a decent London restaurant either. Since the weather is always dodgy, it is a great convenience to be able to check your coat and relax for the entire evening in one place.)

(Note on the photo above: on the Spring schedule for the Royal Opera and Ballet, Mr. Villazon is on the outside and inside front cover, posed in a saguaro forest. What did this have to do with the season? He was in only one production, Eugene Onegin. Was that production set in Mexico? As it turned out, no. We could only think that he was the bright young new star and a full-blown publicity campaign was under way, complete with an exotic set of photos. When we passed the opera gift shop we saw an entire window loaded with his records and videos, which seemed to confirm the New Star approach.)

The stage design was very clever and very effective. There was a scrim which had a changing design of figure paintings as if of statues. They all had an ‘intimations of mortality’ theme: contemplative man, sleeping woman, and for the duel scene, a recumbent dead man, just in case we missed the pistol shots. The set itself had a real pool of water across the middle third of the stage. When people wanted to show how carefree they were they tended to get in the water and splash about. Behind the pool was a low mound, again running the width of the stage, and behind that a backdrop of the sky. Overall the impression was of a country house looking out on to a vast flat plain. The lighting was key; for the first two acts it was warm and summery and the basic colors of the white house, the green mound and the red-and-white dressed peasants made the whole set look like a Rousseau painting. In the last two acts the scene changed to winter: the pool was frozen and we even had ice skaters on it, the mound was covered with snow, and the lighting was bluish and subdued. For the duel we were in a forest of bare trees, and for the last scenes we were on a low hill overlooking St. Petersburg.

The singing and acting was terrific. Tatyana (Amanda Roocroft) was near-perfect in the letter scene, only stretching for a couple of top notes. Onegin (Dimitri Hvorostovsky) was excellent in an unsympathetic role. His Russian diction was, naturally, perfect. Lensky (Rolando Villazon) began badly, in our opinion. He sounded very constricted, almost as if he were marking. Mr. Villazon looks a lot like Rowan Atkinson (“Mr. Bean”) and he sounded as if he was Mr. Bean trying to sing like an opera star. In his duet with Olga (Nino Surguladze) he finally began to loosen up, and in the second half his aria, “I hope Olga will still love me when I’m dead,” (doesn’t get any more Russian than that) he sounded like a primo tenore and the crowd loved it. Unfortunately, a minute later he was shot and that was that.

At curtain call time, the two most appreciated singers were Villazon and Eric Halfvarson (Prince Gremin), who has only one appearance but sang a long and beautiful aria. The singing was wonderful, the orchestra was excellent (is it a different orchestra for the opera and ballet?), and in the end most of the players were either dead or extremely disappointed. Nas drovya!