Suggesting that the theatrical wizard Richard Wagner anticipated contemporary cinematic techniques is like claiming that his music prefigured modernism and atonality: there can be no definitive proof either way. What remains beyond argument is that Wagner needs compelling performers: singer-actors who convince even under unsparing camera close-ups, and conductors who can shape huge unbroken spans persuasively, without awkward shifts of tempo or mood.

By these criteria, the Valencia Ring, first staged in 2007 when these recordings were made, has mixed fortunes. Juha Uusitalo is a commanding, mellifluous Wotan and although Jennifer Wilson’s Brünnhilde is relatively un-nuanced dramatically, she sings strongly and sensitively. There are no disappointments from gods, giants or Nibelungs. Only with Siegmund and Sieglinde, real-life partners Peter Seiffert and Petra Maria Schnitzer, does fussy camera-work give such focus to silent-film clutch-and-stagger semaphoring that any musical virtues in their performances are difficult to evaluate.

One reason for the positive effect of Uusitalo’s Wotan is that he can cope with – and maybe even enjoy – the exaggerations endemic to Zubin Mehta’s approach. The most painful example is his dragging-out of the final phrases of Die Walküre, but there are other places where reining back the tempo, far from bringing telling dramatic emphasis, creates melodramatic stagnation. The youthful Orquestra de la Communitat Valenciana obediently and expertly delivers the plushy textures and stagey rhetoric Mehta requires, but the prevailing musical manner enhances the sense of divergence between essential aspects of interpretation – to innovate or to conserve – which are no less prominent in the setting and production.

In the accompanying “bonus” commentaries Mehta makes much of his insistence that this Ring should be staged by La Fura dels Baus, a street theatre/mime collective which he admires. But a work as elaborate and demanding as The Ring needs much more than occasionally striking acrobatic tableaux, like the representation of the entrance to Valhalla as a “portal” of dead heroes, suspended in space. Other uses of the silent actors’ ensemble, as embodiments of the Nibelung gold or as recumbent carriers of flaming torches at the end of Die Walküre, seem much more contrived, at least when seen close-to on a small screen. The production as a whole is an uneasy combination of quasi-high-tech effects (individual water tanks for the Rhinemaidens, mobile platforms with visible human manipulators for gods and Valkyries) and a largely bare stage with projections: these soon become distracting through being overly repetitive.

The rest of this Ring will be released shortly, when an overall response will become possible.