Individual elements of this Siegfried live up to the high standards set by the previous instalments of the BRSO/Rattle concert Ring cycle. There is no shortage of volume and high voltage to Simon O’Neill’s account of the title-role, first and foremost in the brave and free top of his voice on display in the Forging Song. He holds nothing back. In complement, Anja Kampe brings notable youth and energy to the particular demands of Siegfried’s Brünnhilde; there is no trace here of Flagstad’s Victorian child-handling nanny.

At the start of Act 2, Volle and Nigl pick up where they left off in Rattle’s Rheingold, nicely distinguished yet recognisably two sides of the same coin. Peter Hoare likewise mediates skilfully between identities, as a lighter-toned brother to Nigl’s Alberich and a bitterly comic counterpart to O’Neill.

Those who enjoy Rattle’s ever-deeper probing of Mahler and Bruckner may proceed with confidence. Yet there remains what to old Wagnerian hands may appear a lack of detailed engagement with the opera’s text. What does it all mean? Is the youthful-sounding Wanderer still selfishly pursuing his own course, irrespective of the fate of ‘his’ world? Rattle and Volle need to tell us this to complete their dramatic dialogue.

Part of the issue, surely, is the conditions under which the singers give of themselves so freely. More than any other instalment of The Ring, Siegfried is full of darkness and shadow, dawn and dusk, setting the scene for characters who continually speak (or sing) at cross-purposes to each other. The brightly lit stage picture in the mind’s ear makes that hard to remember, for all the moment-to-moment detail of the singing and vibrant colours in the BRSO’s playing. Moments such as the obvious edit at 0'12" in track 6 of Act 1 reinforce the sense of a presentation rather than a drama.

The swell of comic-book violence at first and then pathos and reflection around Siegfried’s killing of Fafner tells of Rattle’s increased experience with the piece in the theatre, and lack of distracting self-awareness in realising its sound frame on disc: each arrival of Danae Kontora’s Woodbird floods the stage with light. This Siegfried sounds more like mature Wagner than his conducting of the Berlin Philharmonic at Aix (Bel Air Classiques), and is altogether more shrewdly built than Haitink’s studio-bound recording, also with the BRSO (EMI, 11/91).

At the other end of the Ring-in-concert discography, albeit more distantly recorded, Axel Kober (AVI, A/20) has a stronger grip on emotions and episodes such as the irreconcilable surges of hate between Siegfried and Mime, between Alberich and the Wanderer, and on the touchpaper passion between Siegfried and Brünnhilde. By comparison, every point in this Munich Siegfried feels pre-ordained as well as beautifully prepared.