Eugene Onegin

Cinema Meets Culture
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's classic tale of lost love
Recorded Live at the Vienna State Opera
Andrea Breth's powerful production of Eugene Onegin features a tour de force performance by fabulously gifted baritone Peter Mattei. His co-star, dazzling Russian soprano Anna Samuil, has already been acclaimed as one of the vibrant new voices on the operatic stage.
Young and impassioned, Tatyana hastily writes a love letter to the brooding aristocrat Onegin. She unwittingly sets off an unstoppable series of events, culminating in a chilling duel between friends, and leaving Onegin forever regretting the love he so casually spurned.
Tchaikovsky is best known for his symphonic scores and ballets such as the Nutcracker, Swan Lake and Sleeping Beauty. Yet his operas also occupy a place of honor in his oeuvre, and two of them, Eugene Onegin and The Queen of Spades, both based on novels by Pushkin, are among his very finest works. Tchaikovsky called his opera a sequence of "lyric scenes." Its structure prefigures narrative techniques that later came into use in cinema: abrupt cuts and chronological leaps, intimate close-ups, atmospheric interjections. Bearing this practically cinematic structure in mind, director Andrea Breth has produced an intimate chamber play that mines the depths of veracity, precision and charisma of her singer-actors. (with English subtitles / 158 min)