What is sung and played is Wagner’s Parsifal. What is staged is something else, based on the view (as the booklet summarises it) that if a production of Wagner’s final work is ‘far removed from the usual stereotypes and conventions…Parsifal becomes our contemporary’. But why entertain such an implausible idea? Depriving the story not just of spear and grail but of Monsalvat, the emergence of spring from winter and many other fundamental features leaves text and staging dissonantly adrift. Parsifal – or any operatic protagonist – can only be ‘our contemporary’ if the narrative he’s part of has been designed from the outset to float free of all historical specifics.

Producers can sometimes find effective ways of illuminating Wagner’s music dramas by using very different locations and actions to those he himself specified. But Romeo Castellucci seems more concerned with his own ideas about theatre than with finding modern equivalents for Wagner’s. At just one point – the arresting conflation of the religious and erotic connotations of ‘passion’ in Act 2 – does Castellucci seem to be on to something that text and music allow for but do not, of course, spell out in full-frontal 21st-century fashion. Castellucci has also ensured that his singers never fall back on the stagy gesturing and semaphoring common in conventional opera productions. But all else is unattractive to watch, when there is enough lighting to see what if anything is happening on stage.

Haenchen directs an occasionally over-fervent but generally well-paced reading, and the singers are excellent. In his final exhortation to the assembled company, Andrew Richards crowns an account of the title-role that is appropriately forceful without turning blustery; even in this production, which sees him as a kind of Billy Graham figure who is listened to respectfully and then abandoned, he never sinks into utter implausibility. Anna Larsson, Thomas Johannes Mayer and Jan-Hendrik Rootering all share in this quality of eloquent solemnity, without which the performance might have degenerated into farce. The solo singers appear to be miked but the sound balance is not excessively artificial.