Clive Paget

Gergiev is an experienced Wagnerian, one who favors firm, stately tempi and uses them to explore the composer’s thematic layering and musical textures.

McVicar is a director who usually dig deep, but here he seems content to skate on the surface.

Blue is splendid, playing Bess as a complex if fundamentally decent woman from the start, one whose addictions to happy dust (cocaine) and sex in the specific form of the testosterone-fuelled Crown will repeatedly prove her downfall.