In Mime’s smithy, a tatty kitchen-diner, he clinks spoons on bowls instead of hammering swords, and reacts to stress by – as the brochure elegantly puts it – ‘frenzied wanking’. A fat fiftysomething Siegfried with Hitler-jugend manners (and a T-shirt reading ‘Sieg Fried’) ‘forges’ the sword on the grubby cooker, for bellows working the kitchen door. The Wanderer slouches around in baseball cap and biker jacket, menacing everyone with a little revolver. Fafner, harmlessly human, sits immobile behind a concentration-camp electric fence, until Siegfried stabs him and hangs his corpse on it, SS-style. The Woodbird, a blind street-boy, somehow leads Siegfried to encounter the Wanderer in Erda’s sordid washroom. Without passing any fire, he finds Brünnhilde asleep in the enigmatic bedroom from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Instead of waking at his kiss, she knocks him flat and dozes off again on his ample paunch…

Welcome once again to Stuttgart Opera’s Ring, which adopts the latest gimmick of abandoning any pretence at dramatic coherence and employing separate producers and casts. This ought at least to create some sense of adventure or spontaneity, but in practice, as with the preceding Rheingold and Walküre instalments (TDK, 4/04), they simply reshuffle the shibboleths of ‘contemporary’ staging.

This cast, though, offers some improvement, notably Jon Frederic West’s Siegfried (due at the Met this season), unhappily Falstaffian but sturdy and not unlyrical despite some choppy phrasing. Cardiff prizewinner Lisa Gasteen is also an ample Brünnhilde.

Mime, Fafner and the Woodbird are adequate, Bjørn Waag’s Alberich and Helene Ranada’s Erda rather more so. Wolfgang Schöne’s Wanderer, sporting a big leathery voice marred by a wavering ‘beat’, is played too thuggishly to convey any tragedy.

Lothar Zagrosek’s conducting is still lively, but here, with what sounds like reduced orchestration, one really misses a sense of detail, for example in the mighty Act 3 Prelude, the contrapuntal web of motifs with which Wagner marked his return to composing the Ring.

Despite excellent recording, therefore, recommendable chiefly to devout neoterics.