There has been too much indifferent Wagner conducting in the UK of late, with the Rings in progress at both English National Opera and Covent Garden yielding musical interpretations that may at best be described as uneven. In contrast, Mark Elder's Wagner programme with the Hallé - the Overture and Venusberg Music from Tannhäuser followed by Act One of Die Walküre - provided us, in some respects, with an object lesson in how his music should be approached.

Elder's Wagner can, on occasion, be slow. His speeds in the Walküre extract were spacious in the extreme, yet he also has an innate understanding of how to shape and mould the music over its vast spans, so Wagner's depiction of the love of Siegmund and Sieglinde evolved with perfect cohesion from the first stirrings of desire to its final ecstatic consummation. The opening of Tannhäuser, in which religion and sex are presented in warring opposition, moved relentlessly from austerity to near obscenity before collapsing in sated exhaustion and disillusionment.

That there were problems with the concert as a whole derived, however, from the singers in Die Walküre. Petra Lang was a fine, passionate Sieglinde, though her voice now has an occluded quality in its middle registers, the product, one suspects, of sacrificing beauty of tone for amplitude. Clive Bayley's compelling Hunding hinted at complex neuroses beneath the outward thuggery. The real drawback, however, was tenor John Keyes, new to me, as Siegmund. His voice sounded unwieldy, only gaining a measure of steadiness towards the end. A couple of high notes misfired effortfully.

The concert format may have hampered his style, but his dramatic involvement was inconsistent. Wonderful though some of it was, the whole evening served as a reminder that Wagner ideally needs to be as greatly sung as he is conducted.