"C'est la Diva de l'Empire," Jane Eaglen shrills, with inappropriate heft and a marked absence of wit. Eric Satie's raunchy, Franglais cabaret song about an English music-hall singer who turns on "les dandys de Piccadilly" was the closing item of the British soprano's Barbican recital with pianist Phillip Thomas. Unfortunately divas, like empires, have a habit of going into decline. Eaglen is now past her best, and in this instance she seems, perversely, to be bent on exposing her growing weaknesses rather than what remains of her strengths.
Her steely soprano sounds best belting at full throttle over an orchestra rather than scaled down for the intimacy of Schumann's Frauenliebe und Leben, which lies in her middle register, where a pulsing vibrato intrudes throughout. That pulse is now affecting her upper registers as well, as a number of quiet high notes in Samuel Barber's Hermit Songs revealed.
Eaglen's reputation is primarily founded on her ability to sing both Wagner and the bel canto repertory. She duly offered Elisabeth's aria from Tannhäuser as an encore, suddenly coming alive, late in the day, to its rapture, while songs by Bellini and Rossini formed part of the main body of the recital. Bellini's songs are essentially operatic sketches, requiring a steadiness of tone and purity of line that are no longer Eaglen's to command. Rossini's La Regata Veneziana deals with the excitement, sexual and otherwise, of one Anzoleta as she watches her gondolier lover Momolo competing in a Venetian regatta. Eaglen goes hell for leather at it, and swamps the poor gondolier in such displays of loud effusion that you can't but help imagine him running in the other direction.
Even more worrying than her vocal decline, however, is Eaglen's frequent inability - or unwillingness - to communicate any involvement with her material. Her Frauenliebe und Leben is unengaging until she gets to the final song, by which time it is too late. There's no mysticism in the Hermit Songs, and precious little suggestiveness in her Satie. Except for her encores, she uses scores for a programme that most recitalists would undertake from memory, though that didn't prevent her from coming adrift from Thomas in the Schumann. He does some wonderful things with Barber's enigmatic piano writing, but he is a sluggish accompanist elsewhere. A sad, dispiriting experience, every second of it.
