Artiste: Larisa Gogolevskaya

Valery Gergiev brings George Tsypin's Ring staging to a spectacular close with Götterdämmerung in Birmingham.

Why attend a concert performance of an opera? What is the point without the action and the spectacle collectively resulting in, hopefully, the awe-inspiring whole? In answer to this I should like to suggest that concert performances of opera are the perfect opportunity to really ‘get under the skin’ of a work, for two principal reasons.