This is a rather special Lohengrin. Even if you dislike what you see, what you hear is imposing evidence of the rewards that result when singers galvanised by the unconventional demands of a stage director are also inspired by a conductor with the rare ability to combine formal lucidity with expressive intensity. In his first Wagner recording, Andris Nelsons confirms the golden opinions of his work in Birmingham and elsewhere: the spacious Bayreuth sound is moulded with exceptional tonal refinement and richness of colour.

When this production was new in 2010, Lohengrin was sung by Jonas Kaufmann. Some have regretted his replacement in 2011 by the lighter-voiced Klaus Florian Vogt, but – as recorded here – Vogt has more than enough stamina and vocal authority to sustain the role. All six solo singers are musically excellent and dramatically persuasive, with Petra Lang’s excoriating Ortrud and Georg Zeppenfeld’s grave yet warm-toned King Henry particularly memorable. Annette Dasch vividly conveys Elsa’s extraordinary blend of vulnerability and pig-headedness, while Samuel Youn’s Herald seizes the chance for more varied characterisation than is often the case with this role. The general air of conviction owes much to the excellent cinematography, with a variety of camera angles – including one from high above the stage – showing the resourcefulness with which video director Michael Beyer uses current technology.

The main reason Andris Nelsons’s contribution stands out is that, in his case, ‘interpretation’ means achieving the best possible results with the materials Wagner himself provided. Stage directors today are more likely to react against those materials, to see them as too ambiguous to offer any useful basis for modern productions, and therefore to proceed as if Wagner’s music has little or nothing to say about how a work should be staged. So the presence, during the Act 1 Prelude, of an on-screen projection involving rats, and of Lohengrin himself in an agitated state, give immediate notice that Hans Neuenfels finds such information as the booklet’s synopsis provides – ‘The opera is set in the first half of the 10th century’ – useless as an indication of how a production, today, should be framed.

Setting the drama in a laboratory researching rat behaviour activates metaphors about collective psychology, both warlike and defensive, that chime with some of Wagner’s own ideas: that relevance might even be extended to the overriding image of conflicts between other-worldliness and real life, without which Lohengrin becomes something very different from what it can – and probably should – be. Neuenfels’s default mode of savage, well-nigh nihilistic surrealism arguably deprives the opera of those vestiges of human idealism that Wagner never completely jettisoned. It is, nevertheless, a remarkable experience to see how effectively the performers (including the superbly disciplined chorus) respond to the conductor’s as well as the producer’s interpretations of this troubling transitional work.