The first thing we see is a huge, doll-like face, young, coldly beautiful but weirdly flattened. Then, as Tchaikovsky's orchestral prelude darkens and intensifies, another face slowly unrolls to cover it, old as sin, grotesquely powdered, the young face's beauty spot lingering like a melanoma. It fits the emotional direction of the music perfectly, and sets the scene for the whole production.
This is Russia poised between imperial grandeur and chaotic post-revolutionary austerity. The country shares the fate of Tchaikovsky's Countess: poisonous and decayed, it carries on a pretence of exquisite magnificence, a pretence that it half believes and half despises.
This production for Welsh National Opera leaves one with plenty to think about. At the same time, producer Richard Jones is careful not to upstage the music. This is one of Tchaikovsky's most gripping and imaginative scores, and the action both amplifies and enriches the orchestral writing. Only once (unfortunately it was at the gorgeous elegiac ending) did noise from the stage machinery threaten to spoil the effect. By then the emotional charge was so high that this was relatively easy to forgive - this time anyway.
The high point of Jones's ingenuity comes in the first scene of act three, where the deranged Herman is visited by the Countess's ghost. In a superb piece of trompe l'oeil, Jones turns the back wall into the floor of Herman's bedroom: we seem to be looking down on him through the ceiling. It all worked brilliantly: Herman's vertical tossing and turning, the emergence of the Countess's skeleton from Herman's bedsheets.
Perhaps the most striking aspect of Jones's achievement is that he manages to combine emotive tragedy with black, grotesque comedy, placing Tchaikovsky's Queen of Spades directly in the tradition of Gogol and Dostoevsky.
Of course, none of this would be as forceful without strong singing and playing. Vitali Taraschenko's Herman was a little stiff at first but soon developed into a vivid character study, and he had both the intense Russian tone and the lung capacity to handle the long melodic lines. As Liza, the object of Herman's first, fleeting obsession, Susan Chilcott was equally impressive - explosively emotional and perhaps a bit deranged.
Garry Magee's lovely singing in act two made the jilted Prince Yeletsky into a pitiable figure. Likewise, Robert Hayward's Tomsky and Peter Hoare's Chekalinsky had the expressive depth to make their characters believable, even sympathetic.
Chorus and orchestra were excellent, the strings achieving a surprising tonal richness, and conductor Vladimir Jurowski's ovation at the end was fully deserved. For pace, intensity and colour his direction would be hard to beat. This is Welsh National Opera at its best.
Until October 13 (box office 029-2087 8889), then touring.
