The artistic collaboration between director Robert Carsen and designer Michael Levine has led to some of the most important opera productions of the last 30 years.

Yet one of their most universally celebrated projects – an interpretation of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin that premiered at the Met in New York, travelled to Chicago, served as a showcase for singers like Thomas Hampson and Karita Mattila and Dmitri Hvorostovsky and Renée Fleming – has never been seen live in their hometown of Toronto.

That will change on September 30, when the curtain rises on Tchaikovsky’s masterpiece at the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts, bringing home a Canadian production that made an entire generation of opera-goers “appreciate Tchaikovsky’s opera in a completely new way.”

WHAT TO EXPECT

The “beautifully spare” quality of Robert Carsen and Michael Levine’s production is a deliberate response to the richness of Tchaikovsky’s score. A poetically restrained visual space offers a more potent arena for encountering the huge, intensely emotive music of the opera.

Rather than seeking to emulate a naturalistic landscape, or a lavish St. Petersburg ballroom, Carsen and Levine adopt more poetic, economical means of storytelling, zeroing in on the high emotional stakes at play. One reviewer described the mise-en-scène as “stunningly simple, with nowhere to hide.”

Scene changes unfold with a dream-like flow and a sense of romantic melancholy: souls striving, struggling, and failing to connect.

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All photos from Lyric Opera of Chicago's production of Eugene Onegin, 2017. Mariusz Kwiecien (Eugene Onegin), Ana Maria Martinez (Tatyana). Photo: Todd Rosenberg