Fifty years after John Culshaw bullied an extremely nervous Decca into recording Das Rheingold in the studio, the work’s first commercial release (Walter Legge commented that they wouldn’t sell any), Oehms posts the 34th audio release of the opera. What would Messrs Culshaw and Legge make of this very “live” issue taken from the stage in March 2008, and left essentially uncorrected – the very reverse of the flawless studio productions they sought to create for the new LP market? Perhaps they’d be both surprised and impressed at the high standards of Hamburg’s singing and playing (only the Wotan and the Alberich are guests) and the warmth and detail of the recording, and a little worried, as some listeners may be, by the crashes and yelps of the theatre red in tooth and claw and the odd orchestral slip.

If Simone Young ever listens to recordings of works she is re-studying, the Furtwängler Rings might well have been in her ears. There is something of the German’s wide choice of tempi here – often starting what sounds like impractically slowly but building in line and intensity to justify the initial choice – and of his steering the drama through rhythm and pace rather than colour. Young is an alert accompanist of voices and brings a special menace to all the Nibelheim music. The journeys to and from Alberich’s domain become impressionistic tone-poems rather than mere theatre Gebrauchsmusik with many an interesting, even controversial, choice of Hauptstimmen to make the listener rethink all-too-familiar purple passages. I also suspect – and this of course we can’t see – that Young’s conducting closely seconds Claus Guth’s stage production.

A plus here, only found otherwise on the older recordings, is the ensemble performing – the Rhinedaughters evidently “know” each others’ voices; the giants, Mime and Loge sound like they’re used to dialoguing with each other. Koch’s Alberich has power and imaginative use of the text but he shouts a lot – even if that shouting is dramatically intended and unclichéd. The microphone is not a constant friend to Falk Struckmann’s lighter Heldenbaritone but he conveys natural authority (and greed!) in this surely trickiest of the three Wotans.

Most Wagnerian collectors today will be enjoying the benefits of performances obtained via the internet as well as from what we still call “record shops”. The release goalposts have moved so much today that the sheer number of recordings available should be thought of as we do visits to the theatre – enjoy the differences, rather than look for the single definitive experience. In those terms I have found this new Rheingold – an event to hear whole, rather than sample – increasingly compelling in the insights provided by the conductor and the recording.