Unusually for Wagner, the curtain rises on Act 2 of Die Walküre to a quite static stage direction: there stands the father of the gods, fully armed, and in front him his warrior daughter. The music, however, tells us that three creatures are on the move: he in a fix and a fury, she towards him and Grane bearing her. The trio of personalities is drawn with some flair by Simon Rattle (BR-Klassik, 9/20), and before him Joseph Keilberth (Testament), allowing a softening of countenance on Wotan’s part as Brünnhilde approaches.

With Clemens Krauss (Pristine Audio), however, we get the sexual tension between the pair: the hot, heavy urgency of their meeting as a progenitor to the incestuous passion of the Wälsungs on which the curtain fell before we rose to calm our nerves and cool our throats for half an hour. We also get a musical sense of the prelude’s structure rising towards a full statement of the Valkyrie’s galloping steeds from which Act 3’s more famous prelude is built. In this regard, and several others, Axel Kober follows Krauss, as a worthy modern successor. As Wotan advances his futile cause to Fricka, James Rutherford and Kober between them punctuate the argument with commas rather than caesuras, which makes the pause when he concedes (‘Er geh seines Wegs’) all the more effective both as a climax to the scene and an introduction to the interrupted monologue on which The Ring turns. It’s not quite on the level of Hotter/Krauss (what is?) but it’s immediate, gripping music theatre not too often encountered in modern Ring productions, either in the flesh or on record.

As might be anticipated from the cast-list, this is a tightly knit ‘company’ undertaking built more on strong relationships between its actors than outstanding moments or individual performances. While the concert setting (occasioned, as if through Wagnerian fiat, by the flooding of the Deutsche Oper am Rhein’s theatre) may be superficially similar to recent and ongoing Ring recordings by Elder, Rattle, van Zweden and Janowski, unlike them it’s informed by the experience of putting the operas on stage, both as individual works and as a cycle.

Inclined but not addicted to fleetness, Kober is good on colour, water and the movement thereof, such as the sunset that falls in the wake of Waltraute’s departure, the pools and forest clearings of Siegfried. He knows when to relax the mood without slackening the tempo in the Rhine Journey and much of the first two acts of Siegfried. The conversational approach and unstarry casting might be expected to work best in the to-and-fro of Das Rheingold and Siegfried, but it pays off most handsomely in the longer lyric spans of their companion pieces.

Listeners familiar with landmark recordings may wish Kober weren’t quite so ascetic over declining to make the big moments into set pieces. Sometimes he presses the button a bit early – at the climax to the Funeral March – but at least (a big plus) there’s a button to press. Brünnhilde’s final, precipitate gallop into the flames is utterly thrilling, as is all of Götterdämmerung’s second act after a drily sung first scene.

The recording effectively meets and conveys the considerable challenges of distance, separation and space posed by Wagner, more so than either the pit-balanced Frankfurt Opera/Weigle cycle (Oehms) or the big but comparatively muddy picture afforded by Manchester’s Free Trade Hall for the Hallé/Elder Ring. Hagen’s invitation to the wedding feast concedes nothing to Böhm at Bayreuth for iron brutality and in reply the massed chorus, disturbingly reminiscent of a Munich beer hall, more than compensate with projection and vigour for their recessed placing in the mix.

Among the main roles I am especially taken with Corby Welch’s Siegfried, sung with enough subtlety as well as stamina to reserve some wit and rounded cantabile for his first encounters with Brünnhilde and the Rhinedaughters. Leaner in tone than many Sieglindes and (especially) Gutrunes, Sarah Ferede and Anke Krabbe contribute silk-and-steel, vibrantly sung portraits which call to mind important forerunners for their characters such as Weber’s Agathe and Bellini’s Elvira. Believably youthful alongside Ferede, Michael Weinius and Łukasz Konieczny work well with Kober to open out the potential for ‘period’ colour and scale in the first act of Die Walküre. Elsewhere, in the dialogues of giants and Nibelungs, there is the kind of quick-fire articulation and contained energy, more characterfully inflected than Janowski’s otherwise similar approach, that (in Das Rheingold) occasionally made me pine for possibly apocryphal days of golden-age opulence – Schmeckenbecher’s Alberich is even more acted and less straightforwardly sung than it was in the Frankfurt cycle – especially in contrast to the wonderfully centred gravity of Ramona Zaharia’s Erda. Richard Šveda’s Gunther and Sami Luttinen’s Hagen also have youth on their side: there is a fearless, extrovert quality to their rapport with Welch’s Siegfried in the Gibichung scenes that makes some celebrated rivals sound surprisingly tired by comparison.

The familiar problem of a vocal age gap between Wotan and his daughter comes to seem less important through the course of the cycle, even though the third act of Die Walküre finds Linda Watson’s mezzo-ish soprano at its steadiest. She husbands her resources through the cycle’s final instalment to offer an Immolation scene more vulnerable but considerably more nuanced and given to impetuosity than her Vienna State Opera account of the role under Thielemann (DG: both the orchestral response and the engineering are in a different league on the new set, and not in the way around you’d expect).

Last year Kober conducted The Ring in Vienna to glowing reviews, and no wonder. It would be a great pity if only the availability of this Duisburg cycle’s Rheingold on disc put off listeners from investigating the remainder, especially the Götterdämmerung.