When it comes to farce, fantasy and fairy tale, Laurent Pelly is such a gifted director: his ‘giant haystacks’ L’elisir d’amore, his charming Cendrillon, his uproarious Les mamelles de Tirésias all find just the right touch. When it comes to more serious musical drama, that touch can desert him. Such is the case here in this Eugene Onegin from La Monnaie, Brussels.

It’s an austere staging. There is no visible sign of Russia. Indeed, there’s no real sense of place at all as the action takes place on a square wooden platform that rotates (pushed by stagehands) and sometimes rises against a moody sky featuring the occasional scudding cloud. Pelly’s costumes suggest the turn of the 20th century, giving the action – or inaction – a sense of Chekhov, which is not entirely inappropriate.

The stage is largely empty, the Larin family and nurse constantly moving their seats on the rotating stage in the first scene as if playing musical chairs. Peasants dance around the edge of the platform, because there is no room for them on it. Tatyana has no bedroom for her Letter Scene and is deprived of a writing desk, as is par for the course these days. Instead, wooden walls rise behind her, like pages in a book threatening to engulf her. The Act 2 waltz is squeezed on to the apron of the stage; a few more chairs populate the platform. Some of these chairs are duly thrown. The bare stage, with a shot of dry ice, makes for a suitably desolate setting for Onegin and Lensky’s duel.

The shift to St Petersburg is marked by a new platform, black lacquered, angular and forbidding, the chorus making stylised gestures in the polonaise, a suitably cold setting for Tatyana’s imperious dismissal of Onegin.

With a few exceptions, things are on a firmer footing musically. Alain Altinoglu has done marvellous work in Brussels and draws magnificent playing from the Orchestre Symphonique de la Monnaie. Making his role debut, Stéphane Degout is wonderfully aloof as the buttoned-up Onegin, his rich baritone rolling out phrase after phrase smoothly, his Russian diction superb. Lilly Jørstad is a bubbly Olga, Christophe Mortagne a characterful Monsieur Triquet, a quirky relic of the ancien régime.

I was less impressed by Sally Matthews’s matronly Tatyana, swallowing consonants and delivering a hectoring climax to the Letter Scene. She is better suited to Act 3, but still pecks at the vocal line. Nicolas Courjal, given a terrible grey wig, wobbles through Prince Gremin’s aria inelegantly.

The star turn comes from Bogdan Volkov as a fresh-faced Lensky, tenderly sung – his ‘Kuda, kuda’ is honeyed and heart-melting – and believably acted in his gentle, understated way. No tenor can currently touch him in this repertoire and I’m aghast that no major recording label – or indeed any label – has signed him up.