Stuart Skelton speaks

He mostly sings, of course - and this is his first Tristan year, making him for me the most convincing interpreter of the role I've ever seen on stage. I missed Vickers, of course,though his Act Three for Karajan is the only one in my opinion, and in our email exchange before the Wagner Society's evening on 21 July - Stuart answering questions in St Botolph's Church Hall at the end above, while pianist Kelvin Lim and I grin at the camera wielded by Jan Leigh - Stuart wrote back to my praise with the line that 'Vickers has always been, in so many ways, my hero, my example, my Vorbild'.

Anyway, how he can talk, too. The first half of our conversation focused on his role in the flawed but fitfully insightful ENO Tristan and Isolde (production images by Catherine Ashmore). Owing to transport meltdown - I should have gone on my bike, though I didn't want to turn up all sweaty on a hot evening -  I missed some of Stuart's preliminary chat about that production. What I did hear from him was how the video projection somehow changed according to how they were singing - voice-responsive, how fascinating. Shame the ubiquitous follow spot had to clash with it.

It was interesting to learn that the killer part is actually Siegfried, upon the altar of which/whom Stuart has no intention of sacrificing himself. Yes, emotionally Act Three of Tristan is the ne plus ultra, and you simply can't not give of yourself. But Wagner helps in the pacing of Act Three, those three amazing curves. You can afford to die vocally just as Tristan expels his last 'Isolde!', but not a minute sooner. (Below, with Heidi Melton in the ENO production).

Act Two is if anything tougher (ENO helped with the big cut in the night-day dialogue before 'O sink hernieder').

Stuart talked about the feelings engendered as he lies there, curtain up or down, during the dark strings of the Act Three Prelude, an amazing experience; the pianist he brought along, the excellent Kelvin Lim, demonstrated it for us. That helps the Tristan to be in the right 'zone'. He hopes to keep the role in his repertoire for as long as his career lasts, though he won't be singing it in English again; that was a special favour to ENO as he knew it. Imagine the mind leapfrogging between languages throughout the year in a role like that.

After the break, due to popular request, we discussed Stuart's career in the round, the amazing nurturing experience in Cincinnati and how timely everything seemed to be. Peter Grimes remains his touchstone role and informs everything else he does; Erik in The Flying Dutchman he could happily retire. Desert Island Discs? He listens almost exclusively to symphonic music; Celibidache's Bruckner 8 would be top of the list. Directors and conductors? He was discreet, but used the same phrase about those who haven't done their homework as Anne Evans had at the Frontline the previous week: 'when you hear the score crack, your heart sinks'. After two hours' chat, he boldly undertook to sing Siegmund's 'Winterstürme' to round it all off; Kelvin's playing suggested he could have gone on to give us Liszt's transcription of the Liebestod.

A very happy evening it was in the presence of a generous and very together top-rank artist. I've said it before, but these Wagner singers don't have the energy to spare for being dive/divi. That was born out by the four wonderful human beings I've had the privilege of interviewing over the past month or so - three Isoldes and, finally, a Tristan. I'm lucky.

Into Wagner's realm of night

The end of the above scene in ENO's Anish Kapoor-designed Tristan and Isolde, as photographed (like other images from the production) by Catherine Ashmore, is where we've reached in Class Five of this term's Opera in Depth course at the ever welcoming Frontline Club. Brangäne has extinguished the torch and we're ready to send the lovers into each other's arms this coming Monday with Albert Coates' frenetic 1929 excerpt featuring Frida Leider and Lauritz Melchior. Let the Liebesnacht begin!

It's daunting to realised that one could spend at least three times ten weeks on this fathomless and perhaps unfathomable masterpiece. I spent two hours alone last week on the opening scene of Act Two so we'd better get a move on. We also have two visits coming up - the first from Linda Esther Gray, the second from Sue Bullock and (hurrah, just confirmed) Anne Evans.

Having never previously listened to the Goodall studio recording in detail, I hadn't quite appreciated how it's his finest Wagner, for me at least: in Tristan, and possibly (just) Parsifal, I can take slow tempi so long as the music always burns (which it did for Goodall; alas, Ed Gardner doesn't get away with the extremes at ENO - Isolde's Act One narrative is the first of several places where the tension drains away).

And, yes, I know and love her as a friend, but I think I can be objective enough to say that Linda (pictured below in the Welsh National Opera production) is one of the three Isoldes to whom I constantly return for the music examples - the other two being Margaret Price (who of course never performed the role on stage) and Birgit Nilsson. Flagstad? Too weak on the Beecham recording, too matriarchal for Furtwängler;  I must get hold of the Reiner.

It's unfathomable that the Goodall studio Tristan, only once released on CD in mid-price format, has stayed out of the catalogues so long. This is for me the greatest love duet of them all, and how it burns towards the crisis. Ah, some will say, but you need to have heard the live performance sung in English. I did, at a time when I was too young to appreciate what I was getting, but now there's another chance: amazingly, someone has put up a Radio 3 broadcast of one of the ENO performances I must have seen on YouTube. It's Remedios* rather than Mitchinson, a seriously underrated tenor, but that's no drawback. Maybe you will have listened to it before I have a chance.

Other glories include Stokowski's music-minus-three Liebesnacht (with bits of Act Three thrown in for good measure), strings portamento-ing like crazy but the freedom and rubato just magnificent.

As for the ENO production, well, read what I thought about it on The Arts Desk: a mixed bag, as anticipated, but with a magnificent performances from Stuart Skelton (the best Tristan I've seen on stage - I missed Vickers, of course). He's amazing, as he must be, in Act Three, the best staged of the three with an incredible video-projection effect of dark blood streaming back and forth between the vulva-like bit of rock and the pyjamaed old Tristan.

Equally fine are Karen Cargill (Brangäne, just possibly an Isolde in the making despite being a mezzo, but she must sing Berlioz's Dido first) and Matthew Rose (sorry, Peter, he really is very, very good - not better than you, just different - and Kramer's production gives him a hard job). Kapoor's second and third act designs work hard to combine with Kramer's visions, though the costumes are a bad mismatch. I'm waiting to see an opera production this year that has anything like the coherence of Ivo van Hove's Kings of War or the riveting Huppert/Warlikowski Phaedra(s) which knocked me for six at the Barbican last night. If everything in the ENO Tristan had joined up with Kapoor's theatrically workable (just) vision pictured below, it might have come somewhere close.

All that remains to be added is that it's cheap journalism to claim that on this production rests ENO's future, as I've seen colleagues who should know better write and say. The artists have nothing to prove - they've already won three awards this season and turned in superlative performances of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, The Force of Destiny (which has just won a Sky award, though on account of Bieito's very messy production I'd have given it to Tcherniakov's Shostakovich) and The Magic Flute this season. And if Kramer comes over as having lots of good ideas and not yet the wherewithal to connect them, that has little to do with how good an Artistic Director he'll be. In conversation with Tom Service on Radio 3's Music Matters, he came across as a little OTT in his 'I'm so passionate about...'s, but again, with strong observations in among the apparent gush. Let's give him a chance, and see if he can undo the ills and banish the strange aversion to fundraising of the Pollock regime so far.

By way of peaceful coda, here's Linda at the Glyndebourne lake the other weekend. She came with me to a well sung but production-wise not very funny Barber of Seville (I'm pinning higher hopes on the forthcoming Béatrice et Bénédict). We felt the same about it. Very pleased to have met the very promising and affable new Artistic Director, Sebastian F Schwarz, who showed up at the press drinks - full marks for that - and had the benefit of Linda's wisdom. I hope by now he's listened to the Goodall recording, as he said he was going to do, and been amazed.

*14/6 Update - I only learned from Linda this morning that Alberto Remedios died on Sunday. Tomorrow's ENO performance is being dedicated to him. Just listening (rather than listening and watching, which I did a fair bit - great Walter in Meistersinger) makes me realise what a golden sound it was, and very youthful.