As an opera, Tchaikovsky’s The Queen of Spades may be a curate’s egg, but the Met’s decision to revive Elijah Moshinsky’s deftly observed, chocolate box of a production offered a pair of additional draw-cards in the form of the house debuts of conductor Vasily Petrenko and rising star soprano Lise Davidsen. The staging, which 25 years ago was the occasion for both the Met debut of Dmitri Hovorstovsky and the Met farewell of Leonie Rysanek, wears its years lightly, and if pretty costumes and grand scenery are your thing you will have come to the right place. Add to that impressively high musical standards all round and it’s well worth a visit, even if at times it feels like a long evening.

Larissa Diadkova as the Countess and Yusif Eyvazov as Hermann. Photo © Ken Howard / Met Opera

That is not the cast’s fault. Tchaikovsky’s penultimate opera suffers from a weak libretto cobbled together from a far terser Pushkin short story by the composer’s brother Modest. What might otherwise be a pacey, psychological rollercoaster is held back by twee genre scenes – children...