Music / Eugene Onegin, Opera Australia. At the Sydney Opera House until March 28. Reviewed by HELEN MUSA.

The revival of Danish auteur director Kasper Holten’s take on Tchaikovsky’s opera Eugene Onegin, last seen at the Sydney Opera House in 2014, was given a warm, if not overly enthusiastic, reception by the first-night audience on Tuesday.

Despite of a feeling of excessive length, the magnificence of the music and the power of the emotions made for an absorbing evening.

Staged on Mia Stensgaard’s set design of a bleakly palatial building on to which shadowy images of the changing seasons can be projected, this production is laden with Holten’s oh-so-clever interventions, replicated by revival director Heather Fairbairn, to make it primarily a “memory” opera.

From the opening, it gets off to a very slow start as the adult protagonist Tatyana (we know it’s her because of the red slip underneath her elegant court dress) appears to reflect on and comment upon her youthful self, a double clad in red, portraying the young girl who falls so passionately for her arrogant country neighbour, Eugene Onegin.

For anybody totally unfamiliar with the opera, this is nothing short of confusing, as from time to time soprano Lauren Fagan also dons the red dress of the young girl. At no moment does she have time to establish herself fully in the role.

The plot itself is a slow burn. Played by Ukrainian baritone Andrei Bondarenko, and occasionally a dancer double, the cynical, world-weary Onegin (we don’t know quite why) coldly rejects the young teenage girl when she writes to him expressing her love, using the age-old excuse that he’d make a terrible husband.

Throughout the first half, he makes a fair fist of toying with the emotions of both the young sisters, but his presence, too, is blurred because of the not-very-similar dancer double.

The lush choral sections, many of them untranslated into surtitles, showed the power of Opera Australia’s chorus at full strength, and Holten has them bearing down on the youthful Tatyana in apparent ridicule of her romantic ideals.

Meantime, in the side plot, Tatyana’s vivacious sister Olga (Sian Sharp) is in love with her childhood sweetheart, the unappreciated poet Lensky, purportedly Onegin’s best friend, although you’d wonder what they have in common.

Tenor Nicholas Jones as Lensky brought the house down with his exquisite rendition of the nostalgic aria Kuda, kuda, vy udalilis before being quickly despatched in a duel with Onegin, although the gun misfired on opening night.

In the second half of the opera (normally in three acts but here divided into two), Holten is on to something, for regret and self-recrimination dominate the action.

The lengthy first half of the opera ended with Lensky’s death, but his corpse remained on stage left, along with snow and debris from a fallen tree, for the rest of the evening, in case we’d forgotten what leads to Onegin’s guilty reflections. This is another “clever” invention of Holten, which suggests disrespect for opera audiences.

More effective is a ballet sequence set to Tchaikovsky’s orchestral polonaise just after the duel, covering Onegin’s libidinous wanderings around Europe, with visiting conductor Anna Skryleva rising to the exuberant mood.

The final scenes of the opera proceed swiftly with a ball in, presumably, Saint Petersburg, where Onegin is stunned to recognise the poised Princess Gremin as Tatyana, the girl who loved him. In his characteristically egotistical way, he immediately professes love to her.

In a musical highlight, Prince Gremin reflects to him on the powerful joys of married love, Lyubvi vse vozrasti pokorni, performed thrillingly by bass David Parkin.

The ending, in which Tatyana very sensibly decides to stick with her tender, loyal husband, is not good enough for Holten, however.

In a blatant intrusion on the original intention of the opera, he intervenes again to bring in a silent Prince Gremin (if Tchaikovsky had wanted him there, he would have given him something to sing), overhearing Tatyana admitting that she still has feelings for the unworthy Onegin before she says no and he leaves the stage, disappointed.