Critics have called Jane Eaglen "a highly dramatic soprano with carrying power, precise, with radiating tops, a flowing middle range, rich colors and varying dynamics" (Dusseldorf Zeitung). She is renowned for playing the roles of Norma with the Metropolitan, Los Angeles and Seattle Operas and the Ravenna Festival; Isolde with Metropolitan Opera and the operas of Barcelona, Chicago, Seattle, Dusseldorf and in Puerto Rico; Brunnhilde with the Metropolitan Opera, Lyric Opera of Chicago, and the opera companies of Milan, Oslo, Vienna, San Francisco and Seattle; and Donna Anna in Bologna, Los Angeles, London, Munich New York and Vienna, among others. She has performed repertoire with many of the world's best orchestras, including Strauss' Four Last Songs with Daniel Barenboim and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra; Strauss' Salome with the Zubin Mehta and the New York Philharmonic and Sir Richard Hickox and the London Symphony Orchestra; Wagner's Immolation Scene with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and New York Philharmonic; and performances of Verdi's Requiem, Mahler's Eighth Symphony; Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and Schonberg's Gurrelieder.

Highlights of the Eaglen's 2007–2008 season include performances of Wagner's Der Fliegende Hollander with Seattle Opera and his Gotterdammerung with the Norwegian Opera and concert appearances with the Bergen, Helsinki and Kansas City Philharmonics. Currently an Artist in Residence at the University of Washington, Eaglen returns regularly to the Merola Program of the San Francisco Opera, Cardiff International Academy of Voice, and to music schools worldwide, and presents master classes internationally.

Both works on this program concern the subjects of love and death. The main theme of Richard Wagner's opera Tristan und Isolde is forbidden love, conveyed in the Prelude through a musical restlessness and sense of yearning. In the opera's closing scene, Isolde lies over the dead body of her beloved Tristen and sings her final aria, the infamous Liebestod, before she herself dies of grief. In Gustav Mahler's Sixth Symphony, the composer portrays his wife and his children, the great loves of his life. But tragedy intrudes in the form of three hammerstrokes towards the end of the symphony which foretell Mahler's real-life tragedies, including professional loss, the death of his daughter and a heart diagnosis that proved fatal. -- www.seattlesymphony.org