Elder Blossoms: Dominic McHugh admires a Wagner disc from the Hallé

On the basis of this new recording of orchestral extracts from four Wagner operas, Mark Elder’s well-known ambitions for a semi-staging of the Ring with his Manchester orchestra deserve to be carried out. For not only does the Hallé play with brilliance throughout this wonderful new disc, but their finely honed response to the conductor’s nuanced interpretations is, frankly, more dramatically urgent and theatrically aware than some opera-house orchestras seem able to produce nowadays.