Collectors whose shelves groan with recordings of Wagner’s final music drama might be hoping that this one can safely be passed over: and until the middle of Act 2 I was expecting to suggest just that. There’s nothing wrong with the singing – and Falk Struckmann makes a particularly strong impression; also, the fact that Wolfgang Wagner’s production and design are characteristically traditional and unchallenging might actually be a plus point for many. But Sinopoli is not the most self-effacing of conductors and the production is not well conceived for filming. Subdued lighting, which can be fine in a darkened theatre where even the orchestra pit provides only a very minimal glow, turns murky in DVD format. And then there are the excessively balletic flower-maidens in Act 2.

It’s with their disappearance that everything changes. The long dialogue scene between Kundry and Parsifal is done with outstanding musical and dramatic conviction by Linda Watson and Poul Elming, while the absence of much in the way of background on the set means that the filming can focus on the singers more productively than has been possible up to that point. There are still moments of exaggeration in Sinopoli’s pacing of the long paragraphs but the singers can take the strain. I infer from the minimal information provided with the discs that filming took place (without an audience) over the week before the 1998 Bayreuth Festival began, and this helps to ensure a degree of freshness in Act 3 which is rarely evident in live performances.

This Act 3 is very fine indeed. Some visual brightness at last emerges, as the stylised forest blooms for Good Friday: Struckmann, Elming and the veteran Hans Sotin are all at their vocal best, while Sinopoli responds to the simplicity of the staging by letting the music speak with maximum expressiveness. Some will feel that the blandness of the production is reinforced by allowing both Kundry and Amfortas to survive at the end. But the second half of this Parsifal is one I would not want to be without.