First seen at the Paris Opéra in 2005, Peter Sellars and Bill Viola's production of Tristan und Isolde, conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen, has since morphed into a concert-hall performance: the drama plays out in a spare semi-staging, with Viola's original video art retained as the backdrop. That's how it has now reached the UK, for two performances with the Philharmonia, the first in Birmingham.
Sellars had added a few site-specific tweaks, making regular use of Symphony Hall's balconies to enfold the audience in the drama. On stage, a single rectangular box serves as a bench for the lovers' moonings in the second act and as a bier for the dying Tristan in the third. It's Viola's videos that dominate visually, though, offering a parallel thread through Wagner's music drama that emphasises its links with Buddhist and Hindu sources. Some of the images are compelling, but they become more trite as the work goes on, and the final moments, when Isolde's Liebestod is counterpointed by a body borne up through water on a mass of bubbles, look for all the world like an advert for denture cleaner.
Musically, though, everything was first class. Salonen's conducting was exceptional, not for its sense of line or febrile intensity, but for calm, almost nonchalant authority and musical clarity, combined with wonderfully sculpted playing from the Philharmonia. Gary Lehman and Violeta Urmana were not the most vocally alluring Tristan and Isolde, but in two taxing roles they were unfailingly secure and tirelessly confident. Anne Sofie von Otter contributed a elegant, calm Brangäne, Jukka Rasilainen a sturdy, forthright Kurwenal, and Matthew Best a noble and eloquent King Marke, his second-act monologue arguably the emotional fulcrum of the whole performance.
• At Royal Festival Hall, London (0844 875 0073), on 26 September.
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