Die Walküre’s popular but tricky First Act feels like an action piece because of its hectic beginning and ending. Yet a large part of it consists of narrative. The secret of this long-lost performance lies in its casting: three singers who, together with their conductor, are compelling storytellers in music. René Kollo and the little-known (here) DDR star Eva-Maria Bundschuh may not have been (unlike John Tomlinson) in the most lustrous of voice towards the end of rich stage careers but they tell their middle-of-the act tales of Wälsung distress with imagination and emotional clarity.

Tennstedt himself is not a colourist in this music like Clemens Krauss (compare the reading in his complete Bayreuth Ring on Orfeo or Pristine). His performance is not at all the dark, tense, neurotic experience you might expect after those late, live Mahler records. The act’s natural climaxes in Sieglinde’s narration and at the drawing of the sword are less shattering in decibels than Goodall’s (Chandos, 12/00) or Klemperer’s (Warner). But they are truly and fully delivered. The tension is all the more uncanny through being subtly applied.

Without melodramatic distortion or over-painting of the music’s written line, Tennstedt makes sure that everyone playing or singing is given cannily judged musical time. His phrasing is both attentive to the drama and in parts spaciously luxuriant, although a forward pulse is never lacking. Such close understanding and realisation of Wagner’s text-setting from all concerned helps Tennstedt recover the magic rather missing from his studio Wagner (although not from his perhaps misdated ‘bleeding chunks’ concert also on this orchestra’s label).

If you want to hear bigger and/or more purely beautiful voices in this act you’re almost spoiled for choice, ranging from the pre-war Lauritz Melchior/Lotte Lehmann/Bruno Walter set (Warner) to the 1980s Siegfried Jerusalem/Jessye Norman/Marek Janowski (RCA). But the present concert – one of Tennstedt’s rare returns to opera in his later career in the West and which has taken a quarter of a century to find an official release – is a well-worked triumph for its intelligent and experienced performers.