Suddenly, everyone’s doing Tchaikovsky’s intimate and loveable 1879 opera – it was just on at Northern Ireland Opera, Hampstead Garden Opera have programmed it in November, and here is another new production at Covent Garden to follow the variously unsatisfactory things that they have done with it since 2006, when the nice old John Cox staging was retired. The thing about Onegin is – it’s basically perfect, everything you need is right there on the page, it requires hardly any directorial intervention, and you mess around with it at your peril. 

His weakness is for the gesture that looks like it ought to mean something, but is actually just a gesture

But directors hate the idea of doing nothing – or not doing anything attention-grabbing, at any rate. For a while, it looks like Ted Huffman’s particular approach – “distilled, charged”, the programme informs us – is going to be a perfectly welcome stripping away of decorous irrelevancies, with the central quartet simply interacting properly inside a pleasant, emptyish black box (there are a few chairs). And this opera does respond well to the kind of subtle and intelligent direction that can highlight its various themes and layers of miscommunication, bad timing, bad choices, melancholy, memory, nostalgia, pointless tragedy, and so on.

Well, I’m afraid the guy basically bottles it. This is a pity, since there is the core of a good plain staging here. Huffman can direct the interaction of two people in a way that tells us a lot about their thoughts and feelings – quite a skill. And up to a point he knows when to leave things alone and let the music do the work. 

His weakness is for the gesture that looks like it ought to mean something, but is actually just a gesture. Eugene comes on at the beginning of the show and takes a bow, before plonking himself down upstage to watch the first scene unfold (Tchaikovsky doesn’t ask Onegin to appear until the second scene). Huffman likes the idea so much he repeats it throughout, with fairly random (and on one occasion dead) characters looking on. During Tatyana’s big scene, her impetuous nocturnal love-letter-writing to the fellow she just met, sister Olga is pushed onstage to lend a hand, a deeply annoying thing for a Tatyana who has a right to expect the stage to herself for 15 minutes. 

The Olga thing is revealing. Obviously there’s nothing wrong with developing a relationship that is written somewhat cipherishly. But it’s not strictly necessary. And Olga is called on to carry quite a lot of baggage here. Nice as pie to her sister, and a bit offhand with her own slightly suffocating boyfriend, the over-doting poet Lensky, she pretty much clambers aboard Tatyana’s beloved Onegin in a most unsisterly way at the houseparty her family throws. But nothing more is made of it – except that both girls make an unscheduled appearance at the resulting duel, where there’s not a lot they can do since they are not in the script. 

There’s more of this kind of filling-in: messes deliberately left on stage so they can be painstakingly cleaned up at the beginning of the next scene, hieratically slow table-laying, some blasted children sent on as backup during Tatyana’s final rejection of Eugene, a prissy and infuriating move. As ever, poor old harmless Monsieur Triquet is portrayed as freak and perv (and sings flat, too). And yet on the occasions when Huffman applies himself to what actually matters, he does it very well: the Lensky-Onegin quarrel at the party is brilliantly observed, Tatyana’s letter is a beautiful study of fiery teen infatuation, and little nuances of relationship are nicely illuminated.

Huffman doesn’t really know what he has to say about the piece

What’s more – and most important – this is all absolutely rooted in the music, Hungarian conductor Henrik Nánási handles the delicate, nostalgic score with ultimate sensitivity, from that river of yearning at the start that encapsulates the opera and its heroine onwards. Kristina Mkhitaryan never again reaches the rapt, impetuous heights of her letter scene, but it is full of sudden shafts of light and insight in voice and orchestra. The other musical highlight is Armenian tenor Liparit Avetisyan as Lensky: the most open-hearted, passionately eloquent performance imaginable – and at its best when he is alone on the big empty stage, with minimal “acting”, just a great performer, voice and orchestra in harness.

As ever, it’s hard to know what to make of Eugene himself. Gordon Bintner sings it with attractive, urbane tone, if somewhat nonchalant about a few notes, but you never have the feeling that this Eugene gets it in any way, even when he’s acting out despair and fury at the end. Glib and patronising, pleased with himself without the slightest self-knowledge, he really is a waste of space, so why do all these people like him so much? We will never know…

And that’s the trouble. With all its scribbling in the margins, this staging doesn’t tell us anything about what’s happening at the centre, in fact subtracts from it with its titivations – actually about the most perceptive thing Huffman did was to make Onegin one of those guys who doesn’t wear socks. But Huffman doesn’t really know what he has to say about the piece – and then he forgets to just let Tchaikovsky do it instead.