A recent article from the Wagner world drew attention to how pleased the composer was by his children’s reaction to rehearsals of Siegfried for its Bayreuth premiere. (Some of the adults present had been disconcerted by the work’s apparent change of direction after Die Walküre towards the more naive and folk-like.) Naxos’s new live recording – the third in its sequence of Ring concert performances from Hong Kong – reflects much of that simple joy and freshness sought by the composer in the opera, surely helped by the fact that many of the performing company here are new (or new‑ish) to their roles.

Naxos’s engineers continue to gain a mastery of Wagner’s orchestra/cast balance in the city’s Cultural Centre Concert Hall. They are matched by van Zweden and his players’ developing familiarity with Wagner’s sound world. This is a fast Siegfried: the forging scene of Act 1, or the Wanderer/Siegfried encounter in Act 3, never hang around to collect or soak up the Romantic weight of, say, Solti, Karajan or Levine. In that respect it reminds me of the agile musical twists and turns of Clemens Krauss’s iconic Bayreuth set of 1953 (best heard currently on Pristine – 6/04) – and, indeed, some of the wind-playing in the forest scenes of Act 2 matches the older performance’s level of colour and detail.

Earlier on in the evening the Act 1 Siegfried/Mime dialogues have disappointed a little: the tenors’ voices as caught here – Simon O’Neill’s timbre coming over as quite light, although never short of staying power for the louder moments – can sound disarmingly similar. Also O’Neill (perhaps in an effort not to sound the bully) is gentle in his teasing of his foster-father – but at least (as throughout the performance) cliché is dispensed with. And Cangelosi is a special Mime, almost in the Graham Clark class for characterisation and word-attention without the mannerisms of older interpreters.

In Act 2 this Siegfried is affecting in his thoughts of his mother and enjoys himself winding up the dragon. Here Struckmann, moving into yet another Wagner bass role, enjoys himself with a kind of roar‑Gesang, his text emerging out of wild beast noises both comic and frightening. Farcas is a sophisticated, seductively toned bel canto Bird, although it helps if you have her words to hand. Van Zweden is especially successful in his pacing of the sometimes anti-climactic pages of the end of the act.

Act 3 has evidently been compiled with care from the takes available to the recording team. Deborah Humble is all there as a more lyrical than argumentative Erda, while Matthias Goerne’s singing is of even beauty throughout his range. In the big scene with Siegfried he is also able to take on much of the Wanderer’s mordant wit. Van Zweden, who likes to bring each scene of the work to a distinctive end point, carries this god/hero confrontation forwards with a marked climactic accelerando. His violins do well in the exposed climb up the mountain. Then, beautifully woken by her conductor and his orchestra, Heidi Melton’s Brünnhilde is courageous in the role’s high-lying moments and freshly young-sounding. Moreover, O’Neill’s Siegfried has retained more than enough voice to make this a genuine love duet. It’s exciting. I hope this new lead pair will continue for Götterdämmerung.

I’ve literally lost count of how many Siegfrieds the catalogues now boast. But of the ‘legal’ ones you should not miss out on the Krauss/Bayreuth, the later Barenboim/Bayreuth (Warner, 9/05, 10/06) and, if you want a representative sample of the age of big voices, the Bodanzky/Metropolitan (vintage 1937, Naxos, 7/92, 3/02). But the sheer youth and first-time excitement of this new release will make an intriguing freshener to your listening.