In the first scenes of Acts 1 and 3, Janowski – like Rattle in 2001 at Covent Garden and Hartmut Haenchen recently in Paris and Copenhagen – has thought much about how this score should sound, and be balanced, in a non-Bayreuth acoustic. Familiar tropes from previous concerts in this all-Wagner series resurface. Pacing is generally quite quick. Casting and characterisation are naturalistic, apparently written by Wagner. Gurnemanz (Selig) sounds like an inquisitive old squire rather than a retired Wotan waiting to unearth the secret of the universe. Parsifal (Elsner) is a rough, innocent outsider instead of the chosen one in embryo. Trainee squires and knights sound and act young.

Having handled these two Forest scenes – the almost permanent recitatives of Wagner’s vision of musical heaven – like the taut whodunnit thrillers they are, Janowski and his engineers seem to have fewer ideas about how to encompass the Grail scenes in the concert hall. Here, the conductor’s pace and lack of weight do not increase the tension as happens under Krauss (1953), Boulez (recorded 1970 but others traceable) and Kegel (1975, not in Bayreuth), three decidedly ‘fast’ alternative-leaning competitors. The chorus has little fire, even in the right-wing coup of ‘Geleiten wir im bergenden Schrein’, a reaction to Amfortas’s refusal to act as celebrant. As for the ‘offstage’ voices, Verlaine would have been disappointed that his voix chantant dans la cupole sound so backwardly sited. Nikitin’s and Ivaschenko’s strangely inflected Amfortas and Titurel provide size of voice rather than presence. There’s little tension in either of these scenes.

In Act 2, Janowski continues to set lively tempi, but the choir – stand-and-singers rather than sexy flowers – do not match his energy. The solo Blumen, too, are vin ordinaire (compare Goodall’s on the recently reissued EMI set). Christian Elsner’s interesting CV includes the tenor part on the Fischer-Dieskau-conducted Das Lied von der Erde and writing children’s novels, one about The Ring. He has a good Act 2 vocally and dramatically, with the proviso that occasionally, like Kollo (Decca and Berlin Classics), he can sound dry at the top of the voice.

Concerning the final scene after ‘Vergeh, unseliges Weib’, I must confess to having been spoilt for DeYoung’s Kundry by recently hearing Flagstad. No natural Kundry, the Norwegian’s big soprano effortlessly encompassed a tessitura which pushes Janowski’s singer. Another mezzo, Christa Ludwig (who had sung Isolde’s Liebestod and tested for some of Brünnhilde), managed that scene for Solti (Decca), but I don’t imagine she did much work for a week or two after. Surely this is a soprano role, or needs a real ‘in-betweener’ such as Challenge Classics’ Dalayman, because of this crucial scene? But let us not be mealy-mouthed: DeYoung, also Boulez’s Kundry on his last return to Bayreuth, knows the role well and makes more of the central seduction and the first act.

At the end of Act 2 as recorded here there’s a strange-sounding moment as Klingsor’s castle collapses at Parsifal’s spear wave: the rushing string scales are heard more prominently than the heavy brass and bass beneath them. At the present stage of listening and living-with, this apparently one-off performance seems too full of imbalances to promise as much as Holländer and Meistersinger, its previous Janowski/Pentatone stablemates. Among most recent Parsifals I would not prefer it to the Gergiev or the van Zweden, let alone classics such as the Clemens Krauss (Pristine Audio), one of the live Knappertsbusches (Decca or Walhall) or the Kegel (Berlin Classics, 1/94^R).