Benedict Andrews risks a well-known directorial trick for his Tchaikovsky premiere. Everything is off the stage, no scenic gimmicks, but reduced to a few props.
Large parts of the ball act, including the ballet, are simply deleted, in the garden scenes only a choir phalanx forms on the ramp - as the flexible choir is almost never staged. The piece is actually strong because it spreads. Between genre images and monologues of loneliness, between folklore and introspection. But what you hear: diffuse, general things, musically not optimally composed.