Ballet season ends with grand ‘Onegin’

For those balletomanes who have found the fare a bit austere and abstract in this fast concluding San Francisco Ballet season, "Onegin" is back as the final program of the year. Based on Alexander Pushkin's immortal verse novel, "Eugene Onegin", John Cranko's version has everything: seething melodrama, opulent ensembles, love and death, five major roles and sheer grandeur. Since its 1965 Stuttgart premiere, this has become the most widely seen contemporary narrative (I have experienced it in three different countries). Borrowed from the National Ballet of Canada, the production by Santo Loquasto is abundant in birch trees (scenes of rural Russia) and chandeliers (aristocratic St. Petersburg) and sometimes looks a mite fussy, though the 19th century costumes are alluring. Always lurking in the background is the great Tchaikovsky opera, "Eugene Onegin", which does things with the story that the ballet cannot do. Heroine Tatiana's innocent and heartfelt letter to the pompous Onegin in the opera finds an equivalent here in a spectral mirror dance duet, in which the maiden delivers a movement fantasy connecting her to her idealized Onegin. Where the work is at its best is not in the far too many unnecessary corps ensembles, but in intimate moments where Cranko allows movement to define character. [...] he asked Kurt-Heinz Stolze to cobble together a pastiche score, drawn from other Tchaikovsky orchestral items and various piano works, and despite music director Martin West's best efforts Saturday, April 30, at the War Memorial Opera, House, that score fails to grip.