All the principals involved in this second instalment of Simon Rattle’s Bavarian Ring in progress have extensive stage experience of their roles. Under concert conditions, they recapture impressive and mostly believable levels of intensity in their exchanges so that, notwithstanding the strengths and frailties of individual performances, the drama’s pathos and twisted family values come over as they should. All the notes and most of the words mean something specific, as experienced in Furtwängler’s Rome radio Ring but otherwise rarely outside the opera house, right from the in medias res opening tempest through to the harp-embellished tracery of the Magic Fire music, no less fragile and provisional an ending here than the brassy glamour of Das Rheingold’s rainbow bridge.

For knitting together the distinct vocal personalities, with each other and with the orchestra, the conductor deserves further credit. Eric Halfvarson’s Hunding sounds frayed and largely confined to one-dimensional declamatory rage, but Rattle opens out the blacks and browns and dark bloody colours at the lower end of the BRSO’s spectrum to support his singer with, as it were, the collective weight of his tribe.

Near the other end of his career in the role, James Rutherford presents an absorbing Wotan, hardly less superbly articulated than Terfel or Tomlinson before him and in that respect showing up his Brünnhilde. Nevertheless, in his dialogue with Fricka it is Elisabeth Kulman who comes away mistress of the contest – as perhaps she should – with vocal allure and a beautifully even range placed in the service of a precise, sexy, unshrewish characterisation rivalled in modern times only by Sarah Connolly in the Pappano/Warner Royal Opera staging (Opus Arte, 6/20).

The vulnerability and fury of Rutherford’s Act 2 monologue lie closer to the surface than distinguished past Wotans including the pair previously referenced, but they’re there all the same, and he fills the boots of the role both vocally and dramatically, with the reservation noted of an already uneven production under pressure. Unsteadiness is a more serious problem for Iréne Theorin’s large and sometimes unruly instrument – her initial ‘Hojotohos’ almost gallop away like Grane – leading to a culminating scene that relies too heavily for its cathartic release on supple orchestral shading.

The third act’s opening showpiece caught me off-guard: it’s hardly the first ‘Ride’ to major on Francophone balletic momentum, and the recording brings forwards a nicely differentiated cast of Valkyries, but I found the pacing and accenting precious, and the temperature rises only with the arrival of Eva-Maria Westbroek’s Sieglinde. Hers is another ardent and familiar portrayal better caught on record a few years earlier while, at least for now, Stuart Skelton’s Siegmund seems to improve with each new outing, full of nuanced text, tireless, and mulishly heroic when required, still marvellously impetuous in rejecting Brünnhilde’s unrefusable offer of eternal glory in the Todesverkündigung. In fact the entire second act draws out the considerable best of everyone concerned but, taken in toto, this isn’t quite the Walküre we might have hoped for from this source.