Following his 1980-83 studio cycle with the Dresden Staatskapelle (Eurodisc, currently on Sony), Marek Janowski’s Pentatone set with the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin is his second recording of The Ring. It’s reissued now in a single chunky box with a super-LP-size but poorly translated bilingual booklet. This 2012/13 series of one-off live concerts at the Berlin Philharmonie (major rehearsals were also sourced) are claimed as the first multichannel surround recording of The Ring – although earlier cycles under Asher Fisch (Melba, Adelaide), Hartmut Haenchen (Opus Arte, Amsterdam) and Zubin Mehta (Unitel, Valencia) have also appeared in multichannel sound.

Heard purely in stereo, the sound and balance on these discs are transparently clear in their evenness. The engineering and Janowski always make sure that we hear the voices (naturally, not exaggeratedly over-forward) with plenty of room around them, while the instruments still speak clearly. Try the ‘French’ wind and string filigrees around the swimming Rhinedaughters or – in a more heavily scored sequence – the Wanderer/Erda duet from Siegfried.

Despite a gap between recorded performances of no less than 30 years, the two Janowski Rings have much in common from the conductor’s point of view. He continues to present a swift traversal of each opera, relatively free of handed-down Germanic performing traditions yet sharing something with the lighter-textured readings, also live, of Clemens Krauss (Pristine, Bayreuth 1953) and Wolfgang Sawallisch (EMI – nla, Munich 1989) – the lyrical, unweighty ‘Italian’ approach so loved by Wieland Wagner. Janowski’s first Ring looked backwards musically to the early German Romantics (Weber, Mendelssohn etc) rather than forwards. That is still true – try the first Gibich scene, not at all the heavy, gloomy experience traditionally made of it, where Matti Salminen’s seemingly ageless Hagen even takes on some aspects of a comic bass role in his ensnaring of Gunther and Gutrune. However, light and swift he may be, but Janowski still creates a modern-instrument romantic sound picture; he never leans towards the period-conscious approach adapted by Simon Rattle in Das Rheingold (BR-Klassik, 10/15) or Hartmut Haenchen in his filmed Amsterdam Ring (Opus Arte, 7/06, 10/06).

Whatever his views on modern stage production, Janowski has not left his dramatic brains behind. He deserves credit for casting for vocal colour, individuality and rightness rather than playing safe – as rather a lot of record company-led Wagner does – through sheer weight of tone or security in tessitura. In the Dresden cycle his distinguishing choices included a serious Loge and Mime, a clearly acted-out and interpreted Siegfried and a youthful Brünnhilde. He opted for a ‘classical’ Lieder singer (Peter Schreier) as Loge and Mime, an artist with a background in operetta rather than music drama (René Kollo) as Siegfried and a Brünnhilde new to the role (Jeannine Altmeyer). These ideas were continued in 2012/13 with a prominent concert singer, Christian Elsner, as Loge and Mime, and a sharing of the Siegfrieds and Brünnhildes, the better to reflect character. For young Siegfried Stephen Gould, after two recordings with Christian Thielemann, was encouraged to rethink his texts for colour and even fun. The Brünnhildes are imaginatively divided between the torn, more human psychological character in Walküre and Götterdämmerung (Petra Lang) and Siegfried’s more remote goddess (Violeta Urmana).

Janowski’s second Ring boasts the clear thinking in vocal matters, organised discipline and rehearsed detail from before, now captured in actual performance. This gets some of the best of both worlds – potential concert accuracy and good contact plus the adrenalin of a live occasion. It’s only if you compare recent work heard in the theatre under Christian Thielemann (DG, Vienna State Opera) or Daniel Barenboim (ArtHaus Musik, La Scala) that, whatever the relative merits of the casts, there seems to be a greater, more natural musical involvement where actual stage work as part of the rehearsal process has informed the performers’ choices.

In terms of atmosphere, Janowski’s reading still lacks the dark heroics of evil grandeur that blaze through these scores whenever the ‘baddies’ Hagen or Alberich think they’re winning – or even (earlier in the cycle) when Wotan thinks his plan of getting back the ring via his children is working. This is not a colour in Janowski’s palette, although it is in other lyric interpreters’ such as Clemens Krauss (Pristine, Bayreuth 1953) or Kempe (try his final Ring, Opera Depot, Stockholm 1975), Barenboim (Warner, Bayreuth 1991/92 or 2013’s special Proms broadcasts) and Goodall (Chandos, English National Opera 1974/78). These less good-sounding rival Rings from the opera house constitute a more rounded listening experience, for all Janowski’s undoubted success in casting and performing the Ring a second time.