Tchaikovsky: Eugene Onegin

The season opens on with a new production of Tchaikovsky’s romantic tragedy Eugene Onegin. Valery Gergiev returns to the Met to conduct the opening performances of this production, staged by acclaimed English director Deborah Warner in her Met debut. Mariusz Kwiecien sings his first Met performances as the imperious title character, a much-admired interpretation he has sung in many of the world’s leading opera houses, opposite Anna Netrebko as Tatiana, in her third consecutive Met opening night and her first company performances as the naïve heroine from Pushkin’s classic novel. Piotr Beczala reprises his performance as Onegin’s friend turned rival, Lenski. Reviewing Warner’s production when it premiered at English National Opera, the Sunday Telegraph praised its “mixture of haunting visual and emotional impact: cutting straight to the heart of the work, [Warner] shows how Onegin is simultaneously about two colliding Russian societies - rustic provincialism and cosmopolitan decadence - and three wasted lives.” (CoolConnections)