An interview with Yuriy Yurchuk, our Eugene Onégin in this September’s production at the Grand Opera House.
Anyone fortunate enough to get a ticket for Eugene Onégin, Tchaikovsky’s lyric opera being produced by Northern Ireland Opera in September, is in for a treat. Partly because the lead will be taken by Ukrainian-British singer Yuriy Yurchuk, one of the best baritones in the business. He has sung this role round the world, most recently in a “rather classical” production in Japan at Tokyo’s National Theatre. He says now: “It’s my signature role but it’s different every time. It’s the same opera, but productions differ. You rediscover things, find new things. It’s a question of how the role has grown and developed over the last few months.” He says he is looking forward to the NI Opera Onégin – “The people there are amazing, they get to the core of each piece we do, telling the story in the right way while staying modern and relevant which is super important to me.”
It’s quite a plot, with our hero (or anti-hero) rejecting Tatyana, the girl who has fallen instantly in love with him and also, mid-opera, killing his friend Lensky the poet in a duel. “First of all, it’s called Onégin but this opera should be called Tatyana. She’s the one who grows the most in the course of the opera. Onégin is the one who’s stuck, lonely bored, unhappy etc. People say to you ‘Oh, Onégin, the way he treats Tatyana.’ Stepping into his shoes, he doesn’t do anything criminal to my mind. Yet he kills his friend and if you can show as much happiness and fooling around with these guys in the first hour… then Boom… how conflict can escalate when nobody wanted it to happen.”
You wonder how Yurchuk reads the famous brush off aria at the beginning, when he rejects Tatyana’s advances, saying theirs would be a bed of thorns, not roses. “If you play a negative character, you rarely think onstage ‘I’m such a bad guy’. He’s trying to do a good thing, in a way: ‘This girl is inexperienced, she isn’t interesting to me, I’m bored of this, I’ve dated everyone in the capital, I am going to do something good and save her embarrassment.’ To write a letter to a guy, as she does, was unheard of, there are all kinds of prejudices then. How he does it is a different story. He is so self-centred it comes out with a lecture as ‘I’m too good for you’.”
The opera is being sung in its original language and Yurchuk says he’s reconciled the sensitivities of performing the opera in Russian. “Of course reservations are there but I grew up speaking Russian, my girlfriend is Russian. I wouldn’t want to discriminate against a language or a passport colour. I know Russians in the past couple of years who’ve helped Ukraine more than many Ukrainians. It’s not the language you speak but what you do with it that matters, the message. Tchaikovsky had Ukrainian roots and the conservatory in Kyiv is still named after him, with huge pressure to rename of course. Putin doesn’t have rights on Tchaikovsky. If Tchaikovsky were alive, with his sensitive soul and ideals, I am pretty sure he’d have joined those few Russian artists who have opposed the war.” He adds that Eugene Onégin teaches us how people who are close can become alienated. “The opera shows how conflict can consume someone. In that sense, it’s educational. But also one of my jobs is to keep awareness as people say after two years ‘Is the war not over yet?’” Yurchuk points out that media attention span is short, but his performance in this opera reminds people of what’s happening in Ukraine. “Every opportunity I get to draw attention to what’s happening in my homeland, I take it, instead of staying at home and saying ‘I don’t sing in Russian’.”
In terms of performing other Russian composers, Yurchuk comments: “It’s case by case. It depends who you’re performing with and for, what you hope to achieve in terms of publicity. Should we perform Rachmaninov, who escaped Russia and ended his life in the United States? I don’t know.”
There are other ways and Yuriy Yurchuk has sung at numerous events, including making a musical trip to No 10, to raise awareness of the Ukrainian cause. To date, he has raised some £500,000 for Ukraine and there will be charitable giving attached to this production of Eugene Onégin.
Yurchuk, now 40, came to opera late after a career in finance. Working in Chicago, he became interested in opera which he’d never seen (“We were a poor family and didn’t do things like that.”). His first experience was The Tales of Hoffmann which he loved. He acquired a singing coach, discovered he had a strong voice and the rest is operatic history. He has played in La bohème and La Traviata with NI Opera and is enthusiastic about returning to Belfast on tour. “I like the people who are very kind, and the landscape. My girlfriend and I discovered a magnificent castle on our last visit, Dunluce Castle, right on the coast, and are coming over early to see some more of the country.”
What will people get from this night at the opera? “A lot, I hope it will be, entertaining, inspiring. There’s a reason Tchaikovsky keeps being performed even with the controversy, he’s the master of melody. It’s beautiful music, let’s be honest. I hope we can take you guys on a journey, make you feel things, heightened emotion. Gremin’s (her eventual husband’s) all-encompassing love for Tatyana, Tatyana’s naïve love for Onégin, Onégin’s passion and loss at the end of the opera when he echoes the words and music of Tatyana’s letter. It’s going to be visually exciting too, I am sure.”
Jane Hardy