This is an excellent performance of a wonderful opera. Soderstrom is terrific as Tatiana, capturing all of her hopes and fears faithfully while singing very well indeed. Her Onegin, Vasilliev, is believable and sexy, singing with a tenorial baritone. There are times when he sounds very like Ochman. Ochman justifies his reputation with a heartbreaking Lenski, his aria one of the highlights of the performance. Cuenod sings a delectable, scene-stealing Triquet whose brief song (it's not really an aria) garners the most applause of the evening. Petkov has a gravelly tone that suits Gremin well and the other singers are all first-rate. Pritchard conducts a stirring performance, much more passionate than those normally associated with him.The sound is very good though flaws in the original mastertape cause some depressing if brief fluctuations in certain scenes, including Gremin's aria. The final chord of the opera is faded out very quickly for unknown reasons. All the same those who love this opera should acquire this recording.

This was a Glyndebourne Festival Opera transfer to the Proms in the summer of 1970. The soloists and Glyndebourne Chorus were supported by the London Philharmonic Orchestra, an association which continues to this day. The peasant in the first act was sung by Terry Jenkins, notable as a regular character-tenor with English National Opera at the time; he probably also understudied Lensky. I also thought it would be useful to mention that -throughout the Festival performances- Tatiana was sung by the Bulgarian soprano, Katja Usunov (not to be confused with tenor Dimiter UZUNOV, who may or may not have been a relation). I have not been able to ascertain anything about her or why she was replaced by Soderstrom but it was sometimes the practice of Glyndebourne/Proms management to replace a key singer with a more famous one; I remember a Traviata when Ileana Cotrubas replaced Marie McLaughlin from the festival run.May I add to Andy's (this time rather sparse) comments that I find Nikola [spelling according to the Glyndebourne archive listing) Vassiliev's Onegin to be sensitively and beautifully sung, with fine attention to character. Again, I can find nothing about him apart from the fact that he was/is also Bulgarian and -like Usunov- only sang at Glyndebourne in this 1970 run of performances.