Eugene Onegin, Royal Opera House, London

Steven Pimlott's production of Eugene Onegin opens with a single image: Hippolyte Flandrin's Jeune homme nu assis au bord de la mer. Widely reproduced on greetings-cards, this nude is an unthreatening ideal of masculine beauty. His genitals are hidden, and for all we know the area between his muscular thighs and toned stomach could be as sexless as that of Barbie's boyfriend, Ken. For the girls at my school who were too cool to cover their study notice-boards with pictures of Simon Le Bon, this Neo-Classical calendar boy was the pin-up of choice. Only later did I learn that he was also a homoerotic icon, and that some of the boys whose looks we compared so unfavourably to his might well have been lusting after the same figure.

Flandrin's nude is an elegant means of underlining the subtext to an opera that is as much about its composer's sexuality as it is about that of its bookish heroine. Alas, Pimlott quickly abandons the Flandrin, and as Tatyana (Amanda Roocroft) and Olga (Nino Surguladze) sing their first notes, the screen lifts to reveal an abstracted landscape in the colours of a pantomime dame's maquillage: Eau-de-Nil walls, larch-green wheatfields, serfs in scarlet and white like Santa's little cossacks, burnt-orange earth, and magenta sunsets. In such garish surroundings, it is hardly surprising that Tatyana's head might be turned by the glamourous, well-travelled Onegin.

Often a stiff, self-regarding actor, Dmitri Hvorostovsky delivers a more subtle and serious Onegin than might have been expected. The other singers - most particularly Roocroft, whose girlish looks are increasingly at odds with her effortful singing - appear to have been left to their own devices. Rolando Villazon's Lensky is compellingly vulnerable, Surguladze's Olga charming and brightly characterised, Eric Halfvarson's authoritative Prince Gremin the vocal highlight. But there's something seriously wrong with an Onegin in which the exchanges between Madame Larina and Tatyana's nurse Filipyevna - played by Yvonne Howard and Susan Gorton - are the most moving moments, and where the realities of domestic compromise have more resonance than Tatyana's humiliation.

Pimlott drew some interesting images from Pushkin's original but realises them clumsily. Act I's river, later a skating rink, compromises the stage severely. The dancers in Act II have little space in which to move, the nightmare figures of Tatyana's dream are seen fleetingly, and only in the duel scene do Antony McDonald's designs approach the lyricism and candour of Tchaikovsky's score. Musically too there are problems. Philippe Jordan, whose interpretation of Mahler's Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe was the best I have heard, seems unsure of the pacing. Much of the playing is lacklustre, and in contrast to McDonald's lurid sets and costumes, the orchestral colours are diluted and indistinct.

a.picard@independent.co.uk To 8 April, 020 7304 4000