The Tobias Picker phenomenon is puzzling. Born in New York in 1954, the composer is popular in the US, where companies such as the Los Angeles Opera and the Met have regularly commissioned and premiered his work. In the UK, however, he remains something of an unknown quantity, a fact that the newly formed Opera-te (Opera Theatre Europe) is aiming to correct with the British premiere of Picker's third opera.

Thérèse Raquin proves a perplexing piece. The source is Emile Zola's landmark 1867 examination of sexual frustration, emotional violence and self-destructive guilt. Zola's fiction does not always adapt well for the stage: shorn of the controlling rhythm of his prose, his situations are apt to seem overwrought. Picker and his librettist Gene Scheer seem well aware of this fact, though in seeking to avoid melodrama they have vitiated the novel's force. Craggy naturalistic dialogue is re-fashioned as genteel rhyming couplets. Picker's idiom, blending Stravinskyan rhythmic spikiness with post-Samuel-Barber lyricism, has a conservative quality that sits uneasily, meanwhile, with such a progressive subject.

A stronger performance might help. The score, given in a chamber version, is tentatively conducted by Timothy Redmond, while the playing could do with more panache. As Thérèse, Isabelle Cals reveals a startling stage presence and an incisive tone, though you can't hear enough of her words. Carole Wilson is at once sympathetic and implacable as the domineering Madame Raquin, and there's some fine singing from Nicholas Garrett as Laurent, Thérèse's lover, and Colin Judson as her husband Camille.

Lee Blakely's production blends the naturalistic with the phantasmagoric, and is at its best when Camille's ghost, Banquo-like, begins to stalk the murderous lovers. Ultimately, however, this represents the transformation of one of the most dangerous of novels into safe music theatre, and is consequently a disappointment.