Bayreuth’s 2011 Tannhäuser project – here offered in a live relay from the festival last summer – got off to a frustrating start when the chosen conductor Thomas Hengelbrock was unable to continue his period-style work with the orchestra. Nonetheless, although Axel Kober is now the production’s third conductor, intriguing musical differences – especially around the Venusberg music, Venus herself and the shepherd boy’s May greeting – suggest that Bayreuth is still working from Wagner’s 1845 handwritten score. After-echoes of Hengelbrock’s experiment still seem present in the Italianate lyricism of the Act 2 Elisabeth/Tannhäuser duet and the French feel of the Entry of the Guests chorus.

Tannhäuser, not the easiest opera in the repertoire to cast, is handsomely sung here. Following in the footsteps of the role’s creator Josef Tichatschek, Torsten Kerl puts his Rienzi experience to good use as the frustrated minstrel, ending with a suitably tortured reading of the Rome Marration. His women are powerful – only the very end of Venus’s part is a little high for Michelle Breedt – and (for once) powerfully contrasted. Camilla Nylund’s Elisabeth has a range of novel emotions to convey, including humour and sexual interest. The fellow Wartburg minstrels, especially Markus Eiche’s Wolfram, are pretty ideal. And we mustn’t forget Katja Stuber’s drunken Shepherd, here given so much more to act than normal.

Question marks begin with the staging. The opera is all set on an installation by Dutch artist Joep van Lieshout representing an eco-factory recycling human waste into food and (mostly, it appears) drink. It is maintained (and over-frequently polished) by the citizens of the Wartburg, a Zauberflöte-like working community whose Sarastro is a decidedly fierce Landgraf. Their actions – which include a sung Eucharist before Act 3 (booed on this occasion!) – are visible throughout the intervals.

Up from the middle of the floor comes a large circular cage in which hippie-like primitives and dancing sperms (yes, really) enact a faded Bacchic sexual ritual. The geography is kind of fine; the relevance of the eco-plant (whatever Wagner’s occasionally vegetarian beliefs) and its control, or not, of its citizens escapes me. Act 2 – where at last someone has fun with the pretensions and ceremony of the singing contest – has its moments, but too much of the outer acts presents a conventional production in 21st-century clothes struggling with the factory environment. The final image, as the chorus pass round and celebrate Venus’s newly born baby (don’t ask) and Elisabeth returns from the gas oven (ditto) to be hymned by all, is one of over-imaginative confusion.