‘Close your eyes’ is the most tired and depressing piece of opera-going advice, but blind listening to the Deutsche Oper’s latest staging might, ironically, best satisfy conservative-minded Wagnerians going in search of a modern Ring led by strong vocal performances rather than the grand designs of a conductor or director.

This was Clay Hilley’s first Siegfried, we are told, and when so many Heldentenors have risen and just as quickly sunk again, we can only give thanks here and now for a voice that invites keen anticipation of each new scene rather than anxiety lest vocal resources have been immoderately conserved. Whatever the mechanics and effort involved, he has what in fast-bowling terms would be called a repeatable action – meaning that he sounds as fresh when bantering with the third-act Rhinemaidens of Götterdämmerung as he does when bullying Mime in the first act of Siegfried. Hilley makes up for a lack of dynamic variation with an attention to text associated more with Loge and Mime, so that his ‘bad Siegfried’ scenes in the middle of Götterdämmerung are charged with a menace to match the sap and ardour of his duets with Nina Stemme’s Brünnhilde.

Stemme is nearer her last Brünnhilde than her first, and there is more dignity than impetuosity or vulnerability to her singing in Die Walküre, broader in tone than a decade ago but ever more richly inflected with nuance so that the Immolation scene brings a fulfilment of what was imperfectly or provisionally achieved by the final scene of Die Walküre. She and Hilley strike sparks in their duets despite considerable distraction, and both she and the Fricka of Annika Schlicht hold the upper hand over Iain Paterson’s Wotan in their dialogues; in a Ring so consistently cast across its instalments, the sharing of the role between him and Derek Welton in Das Rheingold is a drawback.

Okka von der Damerau stands out even in a role that invites scene-stealing, for the stillness as much as the vocal opulence of her Waltraute. Ya‑Chung Huang’s Mime is an astonishing feat of characterisation, as lyrical as any would-be Papageno while yielding nothing to Graham Clark or Gerhard Siegel for patter-role articulation. Brandon Jovanovich and Elisabeth Teige make remarkably believable Wälsung twins, vocally as well as physically, and Thomas Lehman likewise fills the boots of Gunther as Thomas Stewart did at Bayreuth, so that he holds his own in Götterdämmerung’s oath of blood-brotherhood, and as a stepbrother to Albert Pesendorfer’s Hagen. The smaller roles are cast in equal strength, including the treble Woodbird (following Wagner’s original conception) of Sebastian Scherer.

In support of his singers, Donald Runnicles favours a flowing pulse that belongs to an émigré-American heritage of Ring interpreters stretching back to Bodanzky and Leinsdorf, disinclined to pull out or underscore climactic peaks such as Alberich’s curse upon the ring or Siegfried’s funeral march. Like Haitink’s direction of the first Richard Jones Ring at Covent Garden, or Knappertsbusch at ‘new’ Bayreuth, this approach does not so much work against the grain of the staging as flow alongside it in a second stream.

For the listener at home (and perhaps in the house, too), one signal virtue of that staging is to keep the singers stage front and mostly centre, so that the aural perspective holds a steady focus; the Blu‑ray disc offers an appreciable increase of definition in both sound and picture over the DVD, at least once the audio is routed through hi-fi speakers rather than the television. Stefan Herheim throws no shortage of ideas on to that stage, creates any number of arresting images, and discusses many of them in the accompanying booklets as well as a ‘making of’ documentary on the Götterdämmerung disc.

Reviewing the Marquee TV stream of Das Rheingold (8/22), my initial impressions of a Dogme-style economy of means were steadily undermined by the technical sophistication of its sequels, though the end of the cycle returns to its native state of a stage stripped bare save for a piano. The centrality of that piano, and the scores of The Ring itself, passed round, consulted and ripped up throughout its unfolding, are two of the strongest cyclical elements, though the cynic in me wonders if this visual insistence that everything on stage springs from the music is much more than Herheim’s riposte to the critics of Regieoper.

Another of those cyclical elements is the crowd of supernumeraries who trailed on as refugees and often return as witness-bearers on our behalf, while the film direction of Götz Filenius makes us discreetly aware when the house lights go up mid-drama – as Wotan anticipates ‘Das Ende’, for example. To observe that Herheim is pulling down the fourth wall at such points would misleadingly imply the presence of three other metaphorical walls to begin with. In finding the whole so much less than the sum of its parts, I return to the excellence of the singers, who deliver quite conventional accounts of their roles despite the non-canonical paraphernalia around them. It is in (for example) the surge of Hilley’s ‘Lachender Tod’, the shaded descent of Stemme’s ‘Ruhe, du Gott’ and the endearing resignation of Huang’s ‘Müh ohne Zweck’ where this Ring shines most brightly.