With both baritone Thomas Hampson and mezzo Susan Graham indisposed, this concert could have been doomed. But, with Barbican securing Bryn Terfel and - at two days' notice - Sarah Connolly as replacements, what was originally a glossy all-American opera gala became an equally shiny all-UK one. Yet, if it proved anything, it was that, when starved of even a whiff of cheesiness, the star recital format dies on its feet.

The first half's arias were all Mozart. Terfel brought Don Giovanni's sidekick Leporello immediately to life in the Catalogue Aria, picking out examples of his master's blonde or brunette preferences from the front row. That, however, was the evening's frivolity done with.

Connolly gave us two of Sesto's arias from La Clemenza di Tito, making up a dream team in Parto, Parto with the BBC Symphony Orchestra's clarinettist Richard Hosford. Her singing never lost its poise, expressiveness and sense of line. And the contemplative concert aria Io Ti Lascio brought some languidly beautiful quiet singing from Terfel.

In the second half, Connolly was superb in Marguerite's soliloquy from Berlioz's Damnation de Faust, creating a yearning stillness even after Terfel, as Wagner's Flying Dutchman, had brought Die Frist ist Um to a barnstorming, tortured close. His delivery of Tchaikovsky's None But the Lonely Heart was a little more curious, mixing Wagnerian heft with droopy, folk song-style vowels.

But with each singer coming on for just one aria at a time, it was hard for even Terfel to build audience rapport. No fewer than five orchestral fillers sounded tepid under Jiri Belohlavek, and while the lack of duets was understandable given the singers' differing repertoires, the lack of cheesy encores set an oddly subdued seal.