The Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra produce a ravishing sound, a total security of tone matched to a beauty and luxury of timbre, the strings as luminous as the brass are stirring. Bertrand de Billy conducts with an ear for detail, and also an understanding of the work's vital drama, rhythms strong and clear, propelling one further and further into the score. However, the bar lines never quite dissolve to allow the music breathing space, and certain passages can seem unidiomatic, the slower tempi in particular tending to lose momentum. Nevertheless, there is some very fine playing to be heard here, presenting one with a glorious view of Wagner's unique sound world, if sometimes leaving one standing outside it.

Deborah Polaski has been singing Isolde since 1983, and her prolonged intimacy with the role reaps many rewards on this disc. Though the voice itself can sound harsh, Polaski's delivery is thoroughly convincing, a wild intensity saturating many lines. The problem is that her tenor, Johan Botha, brings to Tristan a beautiful lyricism worthy of Domingo in the role (a performance on disc, under Antonio Pappano), and the two styles occasionally sound at odds together. Where Isolde has hysteria and passion, Tristan has poetry and precision: the individual characterisation reaps its rewards, but in the Act II love duet's final stages, one yearns for a homogeneity of sound to match the metaphysical integration of the characters into one eternal being. It does not help that Botha sounds often underpowered, a poor recording balance presumably to blame.

Botha does, however, sing the role of Tristan with great ease and athleticism, his timbre golden and smooth up through the registers. He possesses the effortlessness of delivery and security of intonation that evaded the last Tristan I saw, Robert Gambill, at Glyndebourne. The earlier stretches of the love duet work very well here, both singers delivering the text imaginatively and finding beauty in the arduous lines that conquer many. Heidi Brunner's Brangäne offers good support. Her voice tends to sound steely, but those offstage lines of Act II are beautiful and muscular, the cries of "Habet acht!" truly registering. The duet thankfully ends on its original skin-tearing dissonance.

The finale of Act II is an absorbing passage with which to end the disc, Tristan's fateful wounding here painted in garish orchestral colours. I would have been interested to hear Botha attempt Tristan's ravings in the third act, but the artist plans to perform the role live in the future. We shall have to wait and see.

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