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Faced with the superhuman will and mind-bending beauty that power Tristan und Isolde, director Sofia Adrian Jupither appears to muster little more than a shrug. The director’s characteristic deftness and lack of intervention might have done much to strip-bare Wagner’s relentless examination of love in all its forms, but her new production for the Royal Danish Opera quickly runs out of what little theatrical steam it starts with. Thank heaven for the conducting - riveting from first bar to last - and some delectable singing. 

In the pit, Paolo Carignani ends a three-season tenure covering the interregnum between the late Alexander Vedernikov and the incoming Marie Jacquot. He presides over an extraordinarily tense and astutely paced performance here - reminiscent of Barenboim’s most recent Berlin account - in which long arcs simmer and swell but with enough held in reserve for each act to deliver a gut-wrenching climax. Vital to that is the unmatched sound of the Royal Danish Orchestra, its peaty brass, amber winds, voluptuous strings and at times unfathomable sonic depths. 

Elisabet Strid and Bryan Register as Tristan et Isolde at Royal Danish Opera | Photo credit: Miklos Szabo

Swedish soprano Elisabet Strid, singing the second Isolde of her career, proves the scope of her artistry. Her voice isn’t the grandest but it glistens in certain light and is deployed with remarkable accuracy, control and gradations of emotion. Never is she inclined to over-sing: much of her Verklärung is threaded onward with a sort of intense, almost introspective focus and she has a parallel ability to command the stage with little more than the direction of a gaze. Physically far shorter than her Tristan, she towers over him in will and self-belief. Even her neurosis in Act I is lined with an intriguing sense of the character’s underlying intent.    

As her Tristan, Bryan Register’s consequential mental disintegration in Act III is poetically and beautifully sung, the American relishing the chance to swim around in lyrical Wagnerian delirium. But that’s as good as it gets. He can appear physically aloof and vocally guarded in earlier passages that demand surrender, while Strid seems locked into a far higher erotic plane for much of Act II. You crave just a little more tonal strength behind Register’s smooth but occasionally watery heldentenor, even if he can skilfully turn a phrase to distract from it. 

Jens Søndergaard (Kurwenal) and Bryan Register (Tristan) | Photo credit: Miklos Szabo

The uneven balance in the title characters could be obscured were Jupither to explore the confusing, disorientating implications of their sudden love or lead us more fulsomely into Wagner’s outlandish vision. As it is, Stephen Milling’s King Marke - who never moves a foot without reason - provides some missing imagery in embodying all the worldly certainties the lovers seek to look past.  

Milling’s voice, like the Forth Bridge, does the same. It is monumentally pleasurable to listen to and his experience in this repertoire, vocal and dramatic, proves priceless. Hanne Fischer’s Brangäne approaches Milling’s Marke for vocal wisdom and takes on a gorgeous, shimmering radiance in the watch song. She oozes care and compassion much as Jens Søndergaard’s Kurwenal does devotion, the baritone leaning deep into his curvaceous voice and finding the necessary weight in it. 

Erlend Birkeland’s scenography starts uninspired in Act I and by Act III is looking, frankly, unfinished. Consistent to all three acts is a ‘feature’ lighting rig - ironic, given the light it emits (Ellen Ruge) is underwhelming until it becomes, in the opera’s final bars, desperately unsubtle. There’s something to be said for Jupither’s light touch and her handling of the second-level dramas played out by Marke, Brangäne and Kurwenal. But the element of this production most likely to have you redrafting your definition of ecstatic love is the sound of Carignani’s orchestra.  

Until 8 June | kglteater.dk