This weekend's matinee performance is probably the most popular opera by Pyotr Tchaikovsky. Timur Zangiev will be on the podium with Iurii Samoilov in the title role. This production features: Asmik Grigorian (Tatiana), Stanislas de Barbeyrac (Lenski), Maria Barakova (Olga), Alexander Tsymbalyuk (Prince Gremin), and Larissa Diadkova (Filippyevna).
The libretto for "Eugene Onegin" was largely put together by the composer himself, with help from his brother Modest and others, from the mock-epic verse novel of the same name by Alexander Pushkin. It came to the professional stage in Moscow in 1881. Tchaikovsky’s many moods—tender, grand, melancholy—are all given free rein. The opera reimagines the Byronic romantic anti-hero as the definitive bored Russian aristocrat caught between convention and ennui; Tchaikovsky, similarly, took Western European operatic forms and transformed them into an authentic and undeniably Russian work. At the core of the opera is the young girl Tatiana, who grows from a sentimental adolescent into a confident woman in one of the operatic stage’s most convincing character developments. Tchaikovsky also upends the opera tropes about which characters live and which meet a tragic end.
It's "Eugene Onegin" - Saturday, May 2, at 1:00 p.m. here on Blue Lake Public Radio.
