Tristan und Isolde, Royal Opera House, review: 'an Isolde possessed by demons'

The first act of this revival of Christof Loy’s production was simply shattering - the most potently enthralling performance I have heard in 30 years of Wagnerolatry.

After Antonio Pappano led the orchestra in an exquisitely poised and beautifully textured account of the Prelude, freighted with infinite sadness, Nina Stemme erupted on to the stage as an Isolde possessed by demons.

A princess and a bride and yet everywoman too, conflicted between love and hate, savagely ironic, ruthless yet desperate, she blazed with psychotic volatility. The febrile narration of her traumatic past was finely nuanced, curdling into a curse of terrifying toxic intensity. Vocally, Stemme was without flaw, matching a full, vibrant timbre to rock-secure intonation and subtle yet purposeful phrasing.

In Sarah Connolly’s Brangäne, she had the perfect foil - a marvellous charcteristation of a hagridden bag-carrying lady-in-waiting, sung with rich expressivity and urgency. On the same level of excellence was Iain Paterson’s bluff, kind, baffled Kurwenal - and only a notch below was Stephen Gould, cutting a burly, somewhat bland presence as Tristan, but singing the notes with meticulous care and tonal solidity.

After the first interval, the temperature perceptibly dropped. In the second act, Pappano missed the pulse of the central duet and Connolly was over-stretched by Brangäne’s warning from the tower, while John Tomlinson’s coarse-toned and approximately pitched Marke was embarrassing. The third act didn’t quite recover: despite fervent playing from the orchestra, Gould merely skimmed the surface of Tristan’s anguish, while Stemme’s Liebestod sounded tired rather than transcendentally serene.

Part of the problem lay in Loy’s dramaturgy: on an almost bare forestage, the chamber drama of two people for whom love is above all a form of self-harming is enacted with forensic clarity and much insight. Behind this, however, another parallel scenario unfolds, intermittently concealed by a curtain. Here a black-tie feast is taking place in what appears to be a gentlemen’s club; women are unwelcome here, and the chaps turn Bullingdon riotous. It’s a world of masculine brutality and corruption.

The concept initially has a certain suggestiveness, but its flouting of the libretto’s geography (the ship, the tower, the flowery bank, the castle) becomes increasingly distracting and obfuscating, while showing Brangäne in flagrante with Kurwenal is a prize bit of directorial silliness. Finally, Loy restricts rather than expands Wagner’s implications.

But the incandescence of that first act is something that I shall never forget.

Until December 21; 020 7304 4000; roh.org.uk