A pleasant ride

When it was suggested to Andre Previn a decade ago that he write an opera on Tennessee Williams's play A Streetcar Named Desire, he was, he says, "instantly crazy" about the idea. True, Williams's powerful drama has an operatic thrust and could provide a gift of a role for the soprano part of Blanche.

But would Previn's score be able to recapture the crackling tensions familiar from the Academy Award-winning film with Vivien Leigh and Marlon Brando? To what extent would it enhance the original? British audiences were able to make their own judgment this week with last night's UK premiere performance given by many of the original cast and the LSO under the composer himself.

For most of the first act it seemed the musical setting was simply going to be insufficiently distinctive to be a success. Much film-score scurrying, jagged brass figures and side-drum rattling generate surface aggression without effectively engaging the dynamics of the drama.

The problem is exacerbated by the wordy text - a result of the Williams estate insisting that the librettist, Philip

Littell, retain as much of the original as possible.

Then, towards the end, as Stanley and his wife Stella make love after his brutal, drunken outburst, a languid clarinet and plucked bass evoke a seedy nightclub, with Stella (the excellent Janice Watson) crooning in post-coital contentment. This is Previn doing what he knows how to do and doing it well.

A highpoint of Act 2 is a scene in which Blanche and Stanley's friend Mitch (Anthony Dean Griffey) share feelings of longing. Expansive, almost Straussian, music, with soaring horns and characterful woodwind catch the mood. Similarly feel-good, essentially tonal music brings Act 3 and the whole opera to an end, with Blanche's vision of a romantic death at sea movingly captured.

If Renée Fleming in the title role does rapture and fantasy better than mental disintegration, that is a fault of the work, too. Rodney Gilfry's Stanley is a plausibly untamed beast. The LSO play well for Previn and Brad Dalton's production makes intelligent sense of a difficult space behind the orchestra.

Previn's Streetcar, like virtually all new operas from America in recent decades, is unchallenging by our standards. But it has its moments and it won't get better performances than this.

Tonight only. Box office: 020 7638 8891.

A Streetcar Named Desire