The production by Covent Garden’s director of opera sees the story in flashback, beginning with Onegin and Tatyana’s final meeting. Each of them has a younger lookalike double, the more-featured Tatyana being a dancer. It could have got in the way but Holten – whose directing style deserves the over-employed adjective ‘filmic’ – handles this device deftly to make the story even more moving. Effective are the change-overs between both girls being present in the Letter scene, one (Krassimira Stoyanova) of course always singing, and suffering in relative physical inaction, and the dancer/‘extra’ (Vigdis Hentze Olsen, tremendous) doing the actual writing at full physical stress with worry and anticipation. A not dissimilar effect occurs in the Duel scene where real Onegin Simon Keenlyside is virtually intervening to stop his double shooting his friend.

As in his Copenhagen Ring production, Holten is good at tracing personal agonies – the second couple relationship is shown in friction from the start, with Elena Maximova’s Olga visibly bored and embarrassed by the wordy ardour of Pavol Breslik’s Lensky. The doubles naturally disappear in Act 3, although Lensky’s corpse remains on stage after his death, and Peter Rose finds a truthful simplicity in Gremin’s admiration of Tatyana.

Equally successful is the musical side of the production. As in Hänsel und Gretel, the orchestra play outstandingly for Robin Ticciati, Glyndebourne’s MD-elect. This is not the big, epic symphonic Onegin of Russian tradition but a most attentive use of Tchaikovsky’s subtle dynamics and orchestral colours that doesn’t lack an ounce of excitement in the stirring symphonic codas to the dances and big choruses. The performance is also sung with strength, accuracy and detail by Stoyanova, Keenlyside and their confrères and sounds most natural. Jonathan Haswell’s filming goes beyond a watchful record of production detail, matching in its cutting the pace and bounce of the stage direction. Hugely recommended – ignore the off-the-pace criticisms of our national press.

We’re becoming well off for interesting small-screen Onegins. More interventionist and visually modernised – different but not better – are Alexander Vedernikov and Dmitry Tcherniakov (Bel Air, the controversial Bolshoi production) and Mariss Jansons/Stefan Herheim (Opus Arte). The Met will surely release their recent telecast of the minutely observed ENO/Deborah Warner production with Anna Netrebko and Valery Gergiev. But don’t neglect this new release.