Memories and fantasies, in olden and modern times, all mingle and collide in this Stefan Herheim production of Eugene Onegin that insists on anything but a straightforward retelling of the Pushkin-based Tchaikovsky opera. The story of Onegin and Tatyana – two would-be lovers who keep meeting at the wrong times of their lives and treating each other badly – is presented as a memory play: a director’s prologue begins the opera at the end when they meet years later. When they are drawn back into memories of when they were first introduced, the opera as we know it begins.

Present and past are partitioned by a large transparent cube. Inside are the memories as indicated by characters wearing costumes from decades past. The glass walls suggest doors and windows on an as-needed basis and the whole thing revolves in ways that allow scenes to dovetail into one another. In the beginning, a bewildered Onegin is buffeted about quite literally by the people in his past while Tatyana is beckoned into the cube by benevolent parent figures and is given an onstage change of dress. At times, her younger self appears at her side. The lighting even takes advantage of the pale reflections in the glass: in one moment of self-loathing, Onegin points a gun at his own image.

Characters not only invade each other’s memories but appear in fantasy form. During her Letter scene, when Tatyana is writing her declaration of love for Onegin, he’s there in the room and even does some of the writing – oddly appropriate considering the spell he holds over her, and freeing Krassimira Stoyanova to give a less physically confined and beautifully shaped account of one of opera’s great scenes. Elsewhere, perverse touches abound. Minor characters sing one sentiment but act the opposite. The Party scene has a dancing bear, several archbishops, some modern cosmonauts and a male ballet dancer trying to seduce Onegin. No wonder the audience laughs when Onegin proclaims that he’s bored.

Still, this isn’t a Regie-Theater free for all. Besides the Letter scene, Herheim directs so many keen moments of character interactions that there’s no danger of the opera lapsing into simplistic clichés (Onegin is spoilt and bad while Tatyana is sincere and good). The young Onegin is warm and charmingly smitten with Tatyana but gently rejects her, knowing he can’t be all that she wants him to be. In his duel with Lensky, Onegin shows up so drunk from the night before that shooting his friend could only be accidental. In the opera’s later scenes, Tatyana hasn’t settled for an older man with Gremin. As played by Mikhail Petrenko, he’s mature but not a greybeard. And in her final confrontation with Onegin, Tatyana is hardly gracious: though anguished, she indulges herself in cruel, supercilious condescension. A major directorial statement, but one might not want to see it more than once.

Listening, though, is a different matter. One can hope for the production’s reincarnation in a sound-only format. Having made his name on Tchaikovsky symphony recordings, Mariss Jansons gives a strong-pulsed, unsentimental reading that finds particular eloquence in the bass-lines, while the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra truly gives the opera the regal treatment. Many of Herheim’s staging ideas wouldn’t work without a singer as physically adept as Bo Skovhus; but what a treat to hear an appealing, soft-grained version of his voice in the title-role. He’s oddly matched with the spinto amplitude of Stoyanova’s Tatyana but what linguistic authority and depth of soul she brings to the character! With his sinewy voice, Andrej Dunaev is an effective Lensky; Petrenko is a good but not memorable Gremin. But, for all these strengths, the visual overload induced by the staging sent me back to the elegantly spare Nikolaus Lehnhoff/European Union Opera production for a sorely needed rest cure.