Death-row drama with more breast-beating than psychological insight - Dead Man Walking, Barbican, review 

At one level, this event represents another nail driven into the coffin of the canard that modern operas are horrible esoteric affairs that nobody wants to hear. Ever since its premiere in 2000, Jake Heggie’s adaptation of Sister Helen Prejean’s experiences ministering to condemned men on Death Row has enjoyed immense global success – and for this, its first British performance, drawing on the cast of a recent production in Madrid, the Barbican was sold out and the reception rapt and enthusiastic.

But is Dead Man Walking any good? Terrence McNally’s well-crafted libretto broadly follows the narrative of the movie with Susan Sarandon and Sean Penn, culminating in a stomach-churning scene in which the murderer Joseph de Roucher admits his guilt and gains Christian redemption seconds before the lethal injection is administered.

But Heggie’s music hardly rises to the occasion: it lacks the nobility and restraint of tragedy. Couched in an idiom that falls somewhere between Richard Addinsell’s Warsaw Concerto and Bernstein’s West Side Story – without those great tunes – it provides a dense sludge of schlock that beats its breast and wails for pity and compassion without providing any psychological illumination or emotional resolution. Mark Wigglesworth’s relentlessly loud conducting of an enormous BBC Symphony Orchestra only exacerbates the sense of hysteria.