Extravagant claims have been made for Mieczyslav Weinberg’s The Passenger, written in 1967 and 1968 but only given its full production premiere last year at the Bregenz Festival. It is that production, by David Poutney, that has come to English National Opera. And in some ways it is hard to criticise. For here we have a work about the Holocaust, by a composer whose mother and sister died in a concentration camp, based on a novel by a Holocaust survivor and staged with evident, deeply-felt commitment. That it doesn’t come off is due to the work’s weaknesses rather than any serious failings in the production.

The dramatic premise is an absorbing one. Annaliese Franz and her German diplomat husband, on a ship bound for his cushy new posting in Brazil, see a mysterious woman on board who may or may not be Marta, a woman whom Annaliese knew in Auschwitz. Terrified for the sake of her reputation and tantalised by emotions reawakened, Annaliese reveals that she was an SS guard, Marta one of her prisoners. This first act is the opera’s most persuasive. As the woman, face darkly veiled, treads the deck like a corpse returned to haunt her nemesis, jazz dances nervously skit above haunting orchestral flashbacks to a hellish past.

It’s when we get to that past that the work begins to fall down. To begin with, it all seems riveting, horrifying, not least thanks to a terrifyingly realistic depiction of the cramped, bare prisoners’ quarters and blasted terrain by Poutney and his designer Johan Engels. But the Auschwitz scenes rarely progress further than vague atmospherics. Scene after scene is overlong, and the interesting central idea – essentially that Annaliese is turned on by controlling Marta’s fate, implicitly by evil itself – is lost in a libretto (by Alexander Medvedev, translated to not-very-singable English by Poutney from a David Fanning original) that isn’t up to the subtleties. One is put in mind again and again of a poor man’s Claggart/Billy Budd in Britten’s opera. One shouldn’t be.

Add to that the fact that Weinberg just doesn’t write very interesting vocal music (almost all the interest comes from the pit and it’s telling that the single most powerful dramatic moment comes from an on-stage solo violin) and I’m afraid it becomes a bit of a grind. Richard Armstrong conducts superbly though, and the orchestra play their hearts out. Michelle Breedt as Annaliese and Giselle Allen as Marta give it their all, as does everyone. Perhaps something more convincing could be worked with a heavily edited score and revamped libretto.

So, an evening not without its own power because of the subject matter and the company’s commitment. Just not a successful one, unfortunately.