Stuttgart Ballet's "Onegin" comes to the Kennedy Center

Friedemann Vogel (Onegin) and Elisa Badenes (Tatiana) in John Cranko's Onegin, Stuttgart Ballet
Photo: Studio LLC

The Stuttgart Ballet returned to the United States for the first time in over thirty years last week. The company performed a choreography rarely seen here, John Cranko's Onegin, created for and premiered by Stuttgart Ballet in 1965. Cranko created this ballet about a decade after he had choreogrphed dances in a production of the Tchaikovsky opera on the same subject, but he did so without using any of Tchaikovsky's music from the opera. Instead Kurt-Heinz Stolze selected (and mostly arranged) other music by Tchaikovsky in a more or less convincing sequence, turning to selections from his piano music and excerpts from other operas. The Kennedy Center Opera House Orchestra, conducted by Wolfgang Heinz, played the score with panache, including especially beautiful viola and harp solos.

The cast seen Wednesday evening in the Kennedy Center Opera House offered much beautiful dancing. The opening scene evoked the atmosphere at the Larin country estate, with the light-hearted Olga of American dancer Mackenzie Brown (who grew up in Stafford, Virginia, and joined Stuttgart Ballet in 2020) dancing with eight women, while the more pensive Tatiana of Elisa Badenes preferred to read her book alone. The Brazilian dancer Gabriel Figueredo, who joined the company in 2019, made a noble, tragic figure as Lensky, balanced and perfectly upright in his turns. Veteran dancer Friedemann Vogel made an elegant and disdainful Onegin, completely believable as he scorned Tatiana's love, even rolling his eyes at her choice of book and then dancing by himself, and too proud to step back from shooting his friend Lensky in the duel concluding Act II.

Cranko wisely chose to rethink the Letter Scene, where Tatiana writes her ill-fated message expressing her love to Onegin. The scene has some of the most emblematic music in Tchaikovsky's opera, which focusing on the letter would point up by its absence. Instead Tatiana danced in front of a mirror, seeing another dancer as her reflection and then Onegin behind that, who then stepped through the mirror to dance with her. Another pleasing innovation was Cranko's adaptation of Onegin's Sermon, which in Pushkin's original he preaches to Tatiana when he returns her letter. Rather than acting out those pompous words, Onegin ripped the letter to pieces, a gesture that Tatiana repeated at the end of Act III, when she sends Onegin away with her own sermon as the tables are turned.

Cranko included elements of folk, modern, ballroom, and acrobatic dance in his wide-ranging choreography. Esteemed dance critic Alastair Macaulay did not soft-pedal his low regard for this Onegin when he reviewed a performance of it by American Ballet Theater in 2017 (with no less than Diana Vishneva as Tatiana). He described Onegin as "a ballet that debases the powerful subtleties of its Pushkin story to the level of cheap romance and bashes at its collage of Tchaikovsky music with sensationalist dance effects and coarse rhythms." Some of these more athletic moves, including Onegin hurling Tatiana around violently (pictured), did seem overdone and sensational. Still, the ballet's more poetic moments more than made up for these few tawdry excesses. Although ticket sales reportedly tanked as regular patrons boycotted the Kennedy Center after the takeover by President Trump earlier this year, the opening night audience seemed fairly full, at least in the orchestra section.

The next ballet company to visit the Kennedy Center will be the Cincinnati Ballet, presenting its Nutcracker November 26 to 30. kennedy-center.org