Rhinegold/ English National Opera, Barbican, London<br></br>City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Symphony Hall, Birmingham

This quest for love and gold could go either way

In January last year, when English National Opera took their first baby-steps towards a new fully-staged Ring Cycle, some critics carped that their concert performances were little more than over-priced open-rehearsals. Now perhaps I've been unusually lucky, but some of the most imaginative music-making I've witnessed has, in fact, been in the stop-start context of a rehearsal. To see a work take shape in this way, to see the experiments that fall flat and those that fly, can give insight not only to the music in question but to the creative process itself, so for that reason alone I'm more inclined to view rehearsals or run-throughs of whichever kind as a rare, if risky, treat than a rip-off. Even in Wagner – the length and breadth of whose works the Florentine camerata would have found as inconceivable as the internet – the Renaissance three-step programme of nobilt·, sprezzatura and grazie holds true; a performance ideal of alchemical electricity born from months of study and a split-second leap into the unknown. That split-second leap – which in Rhinegold lasts for just over two hours – is what ENO presented at the Barbican last week; the point between preparation and performance.

To predict whether Rhinegold will fly or fall flat when it finally gets its butterfly wings of set and stage in 2004 would be folly. At the second of ENO's two fascinating but faulty Barbican performances both seemed possible. The cast is largely cohesive, staff-director Michael Walling's modern-dress semi-staging – played to the front throughout, leaving the audience to edit their own version of the drama from multiple close-ups – beautifully clean and clear. Conductor Paul Daniel's understanding and control of the score is secure, impressive and appropriately slow-burning, if a little blunt at the points where more mystical, booey-ooey radiance is called for. Indeed with the exception of the orchestra – whose persistent technical and tonal inconsistencies disrupt the organic swell of Wagner's inexorable non-progressions – the greatest fault of this Rhinegold is its overwhelming eagerness to be immediately understood.

The most obvious example of this is in Jeremy Sams's translation of Wagner's admittedly unpoetic libretto. Vernacular jolts the hyper-reality of Rhinegold, turning inference into flat description and Valhalla into Southyork. Wotan's comment on the Rhinemaidens' wild lament for the lost gold becomes "They're always moaning" – a prosaic line at best but, when delivered by Robert Hayward's big lug of a Wotan, here more redolent of beery blokeishness than patriarchal power. In this crucial role, Hayward is sadly miscast. His robust, expansive singing might record beautifully but lacks cruelty, complexity or authority on stage. To be sure, putting him in a saggy vest doesn't help, but Hayward appears to have wandered in from a production of Of Mice and Men, making it impossible to imagine this Wotan successfully boiling an egg on his own let alone making a spiritual journey involving the sacrifice of his dearest daughter.

At the opposite end of the spectrum to Hayward's strangely simple Wotan are Tom Randle's slippery demi-god Loge – a lightly worn, balletic portrayal of Wagner's amoral trouble-maker – and Andrew Shore's athletic, rageful, highly characterised and communicative Alberich; both impactful contrasts to the frozen, dysfunctional gods. How much individualism Fricka (Susan Parry), Freia (Claire Weston), Froh (Rhys Meirion), and Donner (Roderick Williams) may gain in the final production will be interesting to see but for now their characterisations are properly restricted to the sparest of vocal gestures. And so it is down to Fasolt (Iain Paterson) and Fafner (Gerard O'Connor), here presented as the Mitchell brothers of Valhalla, to provide us with the closest match to humanity's tight balance-sheet of virtue and violence. For me, Paterson's is the most impressive, thoughtful and sympathetic performance; less virtuousic than those of Randle or Shore; less winsome than the cooing Rhine-maidens of Linda Richardson, Stephanie Marshall and Ethna Robinson; more human than John Graham-Hall's edgy Mime. Fittingly to a work-in-progress, Paterson's is a voice-in-progress; a burnished sound that is strengthening into something truly special. Unlike Rhinegold, which could still go either way, the promise here seems certain.

After all the breast-beating and self-abnegation that followed the loss of "our boy" to the Berlin Philharmonic, Sir Simon Rattle's continuing guest appearances in this country are a pleasant antidote to the hyperbole. This week saw him back at Birmingham's Symphony Hall with the CBSO; still sounding as warm, responsive and refined as ever two years after his departure in an inventive programme of Szymanowski, Strauss and Brahms.

Of course the CBSO are doing just fine; their current director Sakari Oramo has continued Rattle's mission to extend the concert repertoire and the symbiotic relationship between the orchestra and their new-music offshoot the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group (with whom Rattle can be heard next month) continues to enhance the musical life of this city. But the relationship between this conductor and orchestra is still an undeniably close one, bringing a remarkable, unforced immediacy to their work together. If Rattle's international calling card is audacity, his local gift is intimacy and and a sense of shared discovery. As clearly delighted with his old orchestra and their guest soloist Katarina Karneus – whose luxuriant interpretation of four opulent numbers from Szymanowski's Love Songs of Hafiz was preceded by Timothy Robinson's clarion-bright account of the Songs of an Infatuated Muezzin – Rattle turned to the audience and asked if they could perform one of these rare songs again. Of course the answer was a resounding yes. However slight and unprofound Szymanowski's Art Nouveau odalisques might be in the cold light of day, to turn the freezing drizzle of Birmingham into the perfumed heat of North Africa is alchemy indeed.

Profound can come in many guises and for me it came this week in the form of Maurice Greene's sweet, searching anthem Lord, let me know mine end; one of a half dozen tender musical tributes at the funeral of John Williams, organist, pianist, teacher, conductor and scholar, who died at the age of 82.

John's long career in London's churches was led more by his absolute and generous love of music and musicians than by any desire to make a personal mark on musical history. But mark it he did; giving generations of young oratorio, opera and choral singers their first professional engagements. Chaotic, exuberant, intellectual and passionate, John's services and concerts stretched both the sight-reading abilities of his choirs and the boundaries of church music repertoire; extending the then narrow CofE canon of Tudor and Edwardian anthems to include the psalms of Schütz and Schein, new commissions, and such rarities as Peter Philips's solo voice and continuo motets. Those of us who knew him will miss him sorely, but if there's a heaven he'll be there now with a celestial glass of red in hand and some new music to explore. Let's hope the angelic host are good sight-readers.

a.picard@independent.co.uk