The programme notes for Jane Eaglen's Wagner concert with the Hallé and Mark Elder drew our attention to the fact that the British soprano was appearing in "a programme famously performed by Kirsten Flagstad in her farewell recital". The intimation that Eaglen was throwing down a gauntlet was a trifle unfortunate. Flagstad was one of the greatest singers of all time; Eaglen just isn't in her league. She has, of course, been much hyped as one of the finest contemporary Wagner interpreters. That this is partially true ultimately points to a decline in the standard of Wagner singing in recent years.

Eaglen's voice is a mixture of silk and metal: it is penetrative in its upper registers, where she cuts through the vast instrumentation like a scythe, but she forces low notes and her middle register lacks amplitude. At the climax of Isolde's Liebestod she alternately soared over the orchestra and was submerged by it. In the Wesendonck Lieder, where the orchestration is less dense, a beat in her voice intruded on the slowly unfolding lines.

Though she is careful with her diction, her characterisations are monochrome. Her Wagnerian heroines - Sieglinde, Isolde, Brünnhilde, Elisabeth - all sounded temperamentally alike. Only in Brünnhilde's immolation scene did she generate the requisite thrill and seem dramatically involved.

With or without Eaglen, it was left to Elder and the Hallé to supply the necessary emotional clout, which they did in spades. Inevitably you don't always get the full impact of Elder's Wagner conducting - his immaculate sense of ebb and flow over a colossal musical span - from a concert of extracts, though each piece was perfectly judged as to mood and pace. The orchestral postlude to the immolation scene was heavy with ecstasy. The Good Friday music from Parsifal hovered between mysticism and refined sensuality. The Hallé were on blistering form throughout, playing the Rhine journey from Götterdämmerung with jubilant ferocity and turning in a performance of Siegfried's funeral march that was overwhelming in its ritualistic grief.