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And so to the big one. It’s been a long trip for this London Philharmonic Orchestra Ring – Rheingold was in 2018, at which point a whole-cycle performance was envisaged for 2021. Well, you know what happened to that. But it has been worth the wait: the Vladimir Jurowski who conducted that rather scrappy Rheingold has become a proper Wagner conductor, and this massive performance was as complete and breathtaking as any I’ve heard: and the benefit of having the huge orchestra on stage completely outweighs any (in fact, very small) cavils about the lack of staging. 

This time, in fact, a director (PJ Harris) was finally credited, and made a telling difference with the introduction of subtle interactions and acute moments of introspection – really, far better than leaving it to the singers. With the understated video projections of smoke, fire, water and forests by Pierre Martin Oriol that have accompanied the whole cycle, this was a nicely judged level of visual decoration, not so unlike the Opera North Ring of 2016.

It’s quite unusual to be presented with a lone Götterdämmerung like this, which raises a few dramatic and emotional issues: eg, the resonance of wonderful Brünnhilde is clearly reduced without the build-up of Valkyrie and Siegfried. On the plus side, if we haven’t just sat through Siegfried, we don’t have to recalibrate our feelings about the obnoxious meathead of that opera to the top guy of this one. Of course all Wagner has a clubby feel, a sense of being for initiates only, and I guess 95% of those present knew the whole Ring story backwards. In any case, no great concessions were made to any first-timers who might have wandered in.

Albert Dohmen, Günter Papendell, Sinéad Campbell Wallace, Vladimir Jurowski and the London Philharmonic Orchestra | Photo credit: LPO

And really, you need to have the Ring in your blood to get Götterdämmerung, from the first chord and bars that evoke and reawaken so much of what has gone before. The musical virtues started right there, too, with a nicely-cast trio of young Norns (the same goes for the light and jovial Rhinemaidens later on), blending beautifully without any hint of ponderousness. The hallmarks of Jurowski’s accompaniment were already in place – a great flow of ebbing and surging, sensitive to the singers but also independent and full of meaning. And this built very strongly to the triumphant entry of Brünnhilde and Siegfried (Svetlana Sozdateleva and Burkhard Fritz), whose byplay was a bit like watching a pair of slightly ageing bear cubs. These two were more sturdy than lyrical, but you need the heft to overcome a hundred instruments shrieking at your back, and they both more than covered all the musical and emotional bases.

Actually Gunter Papendell’s Gunther was the most stylish singer, though the basses of Albert Dohmen (Hagen) and Robert Hayward (Alberich) were effectively hellish and chilling, and Sinéad Campbell Wallace was a fine Gutrune – she and her brother really rather affecting characters, regular weak humans way out of their depth in this turmoil of hatred and plotting.

And no disrespect to the singers, but the orchestra is what I’ll remember: a terrific, organic performance, everything growing out of what came before, the lyricism of the violins creating eddies and wavelets in the Rhine, clarinets bringing the sun piercing through the roiling clouds of conflict, the breath-held tension of those drawn-out moments of neurosis and anguish. Jurowski’s always been good on the control and detail, but now he allows himself to slow down and let the thing go when it needs to – which, in this opera, is quite frequent. So while Wagner’s miraculous transitions were minutely thought-out, they felt as inexorable as tectonic movements, and rose to scarily thunderous climaxes – those Gibichungs, that funeral, and the refulgence of that ending.

And what you might call the human tragedy was highly effective too: Siegfried’s dying realisations, Brünnhilde’s final understanding, underlining the pity of the tale, the damage wrought by Wotan, the beauty that has been destroyed. How Wagner depicts this destruction in tsunamis of the most beautiful music ever created is a wonder, of course. And this performance did it full justice.