Eugene Onegin

With community opera hitting the
headlines recently for all the wrong reasons, it’s great to report that
Blackheath Halls’ sixth annual production is a wholly positive experience. 

The producers seem to be getting
more and more ambitious, this year taking on Tchaikovsky’s Eugene
Onegin.  The opera certainly
presents challenges, fully met by Harry Fehr’s faintly 50s production. He skillfully
avoids the need for a grandeur beyond the company’s reach in the second act
ballroom scene by setting it as a community get together, with musical chairs
the main attraction.  Meanwhile, there’s a
whiff of the palatial in the Hall’s white and gold pillars and decorated
ceiling.

In the final act he takes a novel
approach too, with a highly effective mass of gold and red chairs suggesting an
auditorium within a theatre, the lovesick Onegin creating a commotion in the
back row while glammed-up society looks on disapprovingly.  When the hall empties, he and his now
unattainable Tatyana have a forest of obstacles to wade through.  That, and a novel solution to Lensky’s death,
are typical of Fehr’s inventiveness (credit too to designer Tom Oldham whose
oblique podium fulfills a number of purposes).

While the crowd scenes burst with
movement, the evening focuses on the cast of professionals, a combination of
seasoned singers, rising stars and students of the Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance.  Kate Valentine’s superb Tatyana dominates (it
surely won’t be long before we see this performance in one of the big houses),
while Nicholas Sharratt (last year’s Nemorino here) has loads of appeal as
Lensky and Damian Thantrey’s slicked-back, cold-fish Onegin impresses.

Andrew Greenan is luxury casting as
Gremin and Harriet Williams’ youthful Larina and Linda Hibberd’s sympathetic
Filipyevna lend equally strong support. 
Students Katie Slater (Olga), Panos Ntourntoufis (Triquet), Simon Dyer (Zaretsky),
Simon Marsh (Steward) and David William-Matthews (Captain) show bags of
promise.

The chorus teems with detail and overflows with
the enthusiastic involvement of a range of local schools, one of the most
heartwarming aspects of this project.  The
orchestra, despite the odd inaccuracy, play Tchaikovsky’s glorious score with
zest under conductor Nicholas Jenkins and, all told, it’s another triumph for
the Blackheath Halls community opera project, a ray of light in difficult
times.

– Simon Thomas