Hot on the heels of its complete Ring cycle from Hamburg, Oehms Classics now offers the current Frankfurt staging. In Siegfried the title-role is sung by Lance Ryan, last encountered in the Valencia Fura dels Baus cycle (Unitel DVDs, 6/10). For that controversial production, Ryan was required ‘to be the very acme of boorishness’ and, as a result, I found his singing ‘perhaps too unvariedly forceful’. It isn’t possible to tell from the production photographs in the booklet whether ‘boorishness’ was also required in Frankfurt but unvaried forcefulness is still very much in evidence. Even in Siegfried’s more reflective moments there is little refinement or relaxation in Ryan’s projection of Wagner’s text and music. With his extraordinary reserves of stamina he is truly formidable in a broadly paced forging scene. But in Act 2 only the short episode in which he muses about his mother has any degree of tenderness, and in much of Act 3 he comes across as disconcertingly blunt and matter-of-fact.

These limitations matter less than they might; Sebastian Weigle’s sensitive grasp of the mammoth score’s multivalent moods ensures that the performance retains a powerful grip on the listener and the vividly characterised orchestral playing is well recorded in a restricted but not excessively dry acoustic. In addition, the tirelessly heroic Ryan is well complemented by the other singers, perhaps most strikingly Jochen Schmeckenbecher, whose Alberich initially sounds more like the soulful Wolfram in Tannhaüser than one of Wagner’s more malevolent villains. Schmeckenbecher proves far from lightweight in the role, however, and his vivid encounters with Wotan (Terje Stensvold) and Mime – the excellent Peter Marsh – show the Frankfurt ensemble working at its best.

Like Schmeckenbecher, Stensvold can also move towards understatement in places – a quality that, if required by the production, doesn’t prevent him from creating an imposing impression in his role’s more purple passages: for example, the exchanges with a notably vibrant Erda (Meredith Arwady). Vulnerability as well as exaltation are also well conveyed by Susan Bullock; the recording catches a certain shrillness in her higher-lying phrases but she does much to ensure that the long final scene of Act 3, though quite expansively paced by Weigle, maintains the vice-like dramatic grip so characteristic of the whole.