On its tenth and final visit to the glorious Nevill Holt estate in Leicestershire, Grange Park Opera presented a lucid, affecting and extremely good-looking production of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, under conductor Toby Purser. One of the great tearjerkers of the stage, this intensely melodic work, focuses on a young girl Tatyana (Ilona Domnich) whose rash declaration of love in a letter to the proud Onegin (James McOran-Campbell) leads to his embarrassing rejection of her, with curt advice that she should better control her emotions.

Meanwhile, rashness on his part in flirting with Tatyana’s elder sister Olga (Caryl Hughes) leads to a furious reaction from her fiancé, his friend Lensky (Anthony Flaum). Wild with jealous anger, he challenges Onegin to a duel but himself becomes its victim. His fate tragically presages that of Alexander Pushkin, on whose novel the opera is based.

Under director Stephen Medcalf, the piece was most attractively presented, with designer Francis O’Connor producing a two-tier galleried set that allowed action to spread beyond the narrow confines of the stage. This was particularly useful in the scene at the country dance and later at the grand ball where Onegin himself tastes the bitterness of rejection by Tatyana, now risen to the pinnacle of society as wife to Prince Gremin (Matthew Stiff, superb in his long and lovely aria).

One touch of which I did not approve, however — it looked absurd — was the disembodied hand writing away at the desk (in a bedless bedroom) during the letter scene. Will this survive when the production heads to The Grange next year?