La Cerisaie, Paris Opera (Garnier)

What were they thinking of? There is so much that is bafflingly wrong with Philippe Fénelon’s new opera – score, libretto and staging – that it is hard to know where to begin. But let’s start with the choice of Chekhov, hardly an obvious option even if the dominant introspective tone in his plays should appeal strongly to contemporary opera composers’ aversion to eventful narrative. Peter Eötvös’s Three Sisters, which premiered in Lyons in 1998 before spawning other productions, is convincing proof that it can be done sensitively.

Eötvös tinkered with the original text but still preserved the dramatic thread. Fénelon’s librettist Alexi Parin concentrates on Act III of The Cherry Orchard, reshuffling the chronology – we start with Lopakhin’s triumphant announcement that he has bought the estate – and marooning the characters in their own worlds. Bereft of context, they are left to tell their stories in turn like so many unrelated candidates at an audition. Worse, adding in folk songs and extra text conflates the act’s spare architecture into a garrulous prologue and two acts. It never moves forward and it feels like an eternity but in fact lasts barely two hours.

Fénelon’s often dirge-like score – steeped as usual in Berg but this time heavy with quotes from Russian music – adds insult to injury with aggressive, overwritten orchestration. It too often seems geared to Dostoyevskian angst or a Solzhenitsyn gulag and jars with a fin-de-race family weighing its memories and confronting the end of an era. Even leavened with traditional lullabies and harmonious choruses – but also an embarrassing lift from Verdi’s Masked Ball on the feeble grounds that this is the act where the ball takes place – it is still an exhausting onslaught on the ears.

Georges Lavaudant’s staging and Jean-Pierre Vergier’s glacial, hideous sets and costumes deliver the coup de grâce. Lavaudant works hard to outbid Fénelon with corny ideas. Monologues are swamped in useless background agitation; a ballerina flutters on so often, she seems to be justifying her fee, while a chorus of babushka peasants is handled with comical woodenness.

Vergier spurns any hint of cherry orchard – of course, it’s too obvious – and goes for a drab façade of sinister grey oak trees instead; also beyond human understanding is Madame Ranyevskaya’s choice of vampire make-up and Medusa hair, surely the closest resemblance to a bordello madam yet seen in Chekhov.

The fiasco would be complete but for the singing, which is uniformly excellent, led by Anna Krainikova’s engaging Varia and Ulyana Aleksyuk’s sparkling Ania, the latter another of Fénelon’s stock coloratura parts. But any talent scout in the audience would have been busy scribbling down the names of all these young singers. They deserve a medal for putting up with this shabby circus.

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