British soprano Jane Eaglen is hell bent on challenging the legendary divas of yesteryear. Hard on the heels of a Wagner concert with the Hallé, in which she copied one of Kirsten Flagstad's recital programmes, Eaglen is now appearing in a new English National Opera production of Spontini's La Vestale, an opera associated with Maria Callas, whose performances in the work in the 1950s were the stuff of musical mythology.
Both Eaglen and the ENO fall lamentably short of the challenges the piece presents. Gaspare Spontini was an Italian ex-pat who made his name in Napoleonic France. La Vestale, first performed in 1807, deals with the conflicting demands of sex, religion and empire in its depiction of the eponymous vestal virgin Giulia, disastrously in love with Licinius, a general in the Roman army.
Admired by Beethoven and Wagner, it strongly influenced Berlioz, whose own operas are unthinkable without Spontini's finely honed mixture of declamation and lyricism, his spacious pacing and his glorious choral writing.
The role of Giulia is difficult, requiring a singing actress capable of teasing out subtle shades of meaning from Spontini's exacting vocal lines. It is the sort of thing Callas did to perfection, though Eaglen struggles with it.
Statuesque on stage, she is no actress, though she sculpts the phrases with something approaching sensitivity. Technically, however, she falls short: her tone is pinched under pressure; there is a beat in her voice and you are often aware of sagging pitch.
She is not helped by what surrounds her. Francesca Zambello's production takes the opera's imperial origins as the starting point for a messy study in all-purpose 20th century totalitarianism, with blokes in fatigues and women in Levantine ethnic gear wandering about a set that looks like a rejected sketch for the 1936 Berlin Olympic stadium.
The score has been slashed to bits, with more than an hour's music excised. David Parry, conducting, does what he can with the fragments that remain, but you get no sense of the opera's cumulative power.
The rest of the soloists are variable. Anne-Marie Owens' High Priestess is unhinged dramatically and vocally, John Hudson is an effortful Licinius and the best singing by far comes from Paul Nilon as his sidekick, Cinna.
The whole is a mess. Spontini deserves infinitely better than this.
· In rep until April 26. Box office: 020-7632 8300.
