English National Opera's new Ring cycle could best be described as an extended work in progress. The company is revealing an admirable refusal to hurry, assembling Wagner's tetralogy piece by piece, with each opera presented in semi-staged concert performances at the Barbican, until the cycle is completed next year. It won't hit the stage until Phyllida Lloyd's production opens at the refurbished Coliseum in 2004.
It's questionable, however, whether Lloyd could come up with anything as powerful as Michael Walling's semi-staging of The Valkyrie, which, in its drastic simplicity, stirs echoes of Wieland Wagner's legendary productions in the 1950s and 1960s. The tragedy plays itself out on a narrow platform in front of the orchestra. There is no set, apart from a couple of benches, although a complex lighting plot steers us through changes of location and mood.
The modern-dress costumes are effective, with Susan Parry's Fricka grandly sweeping on in velvet and ruffles, while the Valkyries are got up as leather-clad bike-chicks. What we are left with is a series of emotional, psychological and dialectical confrontations, unremitting in their force simply because there is no extraneous directorial or design concept behind which the characters can hide.
Musically, the evening is similarly uncompromising. ENO's music director Paul Daniel is at his best in Wagner, strong on shape if less incisive when it comes to points of detail. More importantly, he veers away from stentorian pomp towards a rawness of emotion that superbly encapsulates Wagnerian danger - the erotic, narcotic quality of his music that bypasses reason and sets your nerves jangling.
The cast is also fairly electrifying, a cogent ensemble in which dramatic integration makes up for occasional vocal inequalities. Robert Hayward's magnetic Wotan is overwhelming in his lyricism, if sometimes short on declamatory power. Kathleen Broderick's athletic, Brünnhilde is metallic of voice, but she tellingly conveys both the Valkyrie's wildness and her growing compassion for ensnared humanity. Parry compensates for the occasional squawk with insights into the sexual frustration beneath Fricka's implacable facade.
The finest singing comes from the human trio caught in the gods' machinations. Par Lindskog and Orla Boylan, great artists both, are wonderful as Siegmund and Sieglinde, generating a powerful sexual charge, both vocally and physically, while Clive Bayley's supremely vulpine Hunding looks on and rages. The whole is a formidable achievement, every glorious second of it.
· Repeat performance at the Barbican, London (020-7638 8891), tomorrow.
