With this final opera in Wagner's Ring Cycle, Longborough Festival Opera's four-year gamble pays off handsomely. Director Alan Privett's staging maintains its economy of approach: designer Kjell Torriset's utilitarian scaffolding grids and towers are stark; rope walls imply the assault course of life. The three Norns whose prologue spells out the impending doom appear as giant conical figures gliding eerily, the tubular-framed obelisks that lent them their height then doing duty as abstracted forms for the rest of the evening. But the bonus of such simplicity is that the narrative is so manifestly clear, characterisation and motivation always traceable along this last journey to the gods' damnation. If the wholly monochrome scheme feels more unrelenting this time round, it at least serves to grandstand the final red glow of Brünnhilde's ultimate self-sacrificial immolation.

Rachel Nicholls, whose recent transformation into a dramatic soprano might itself be the stuff of mythology, was a wonderful Brünnhilde: rich, fiery and utterly credible, she was also capable of bringing the intimacy and immediacy of lieder to moments of expressiveness. The Estonian Mati Turi was her Siegfried, gratifyingly, at his most endearing and lyrical in his last big sing before death. Casting throughout was strong: with Catherine King a wonderful First Norn, doubling Flosshilde, and Lee Bisset bringing a fine intensity to Gutrune. Stuart Pendred's Hagen was a suitably dark and malevolent presence, key to the slow unravelling of the whole doomed edifice.

Yet, as in the previous operas of the quadrilogy, the night belongs to conductor Anthony Negus. His authority and understanding means that the score's infinite glories are always realised, his pacing of the long trajectory both instinctive and inspired.