In January 2013 a brand-new concert hall was opened in Bordeaux, and the following September Paul Daniel took over as Music Director of the Orchestre National Bordeaux Aquitaine. This CD is very much for local consumption: priority in the accompanying hard-cover booklet is given to photographs of orchestra and conductor, and the accompanying notes and texts (even though Wagner is sung in German) are in French only. The disc celebrates something of which those attending and financially supporting the local enterprise can be proud. Purely as a CD, of course, it enters a highly competitive field.

American soprano Heidi Melton began her career less than 10 years ago but she displays great assurance and considerable accomplishment in this trio of vocal items. Placed well forward of the orchestra, she has no obvious technical weaknesses: and while Isolde’s Liebestod is probably cooler in tone than it would be if she were in a live staging of the whole work, the Tannhäuser and Götterdämmerung scenes are well characterised and (on the whole) well played. I have a few quibbles about aspects of Paul Daniels’s pacing: the ‘Paris’ Tannhäuser music needs more Bacchanalian abandon, and purposeful flow isn’t consistent enough elsewhere. In their different ways, most of the six extracts exhibit the kind of ‘stop-go’ strategies suggesting that rapport between conductor and performers was still at an exploratory stage. The counterproductive contrast between holding back and pushing forwards is very marked in the orchestral conclusion to Götterdämmerung; but the warm applause which follows confirms that these live performances on a special occasion were well received in Bordeaux.