A CONCERT performance? That is how this astonishing Die Walküre Prom was advertised. But with the present Covent Garden cast treading the boards — Plácido Domingo, Bryn Terfel, Waltraud Meier and all — we were never going to get a line of gents and ladies in polite evening wear, nosing through the score.

Even so, the dramatic impact of their gestures, crumplings and caresses, plotted with Michael Moxham’s stage guidance, moved far beyond expectations. The first wonder was the season’s starriest “Proms Debut Artist”, Domingo.

With his sunburnt tenor, he was not a man born to sing Wagner and the youthfully tragic Siegmund presents its own challenge. Yet he reached the part’s heart thanks to two unassailable weapons: a miraculous voice scarcely damaged by time or ego, and a standard of artistry no other superstar tenor can match.

He was helped, too, as we all were, by not having Stefanos Lazaridis’s Covent Garden designs to surmount. No suspended swords, no curling metal, no video projections pregnant with abstractions. The fiddly symbolic clutter was swept away, giving every singer the chance to deepen characterisations through voice and gesture alone.

Domingo was superb at this: the eloquent hands tight by his waist, cradling an invisible cup or, most affecting of all, reaching toward the object of his incestuous love. Even the brow-mopping with a handkerchief seemed part of the drama. With Waltraud Meier’s equally ringing and expressive Sieglinde, the principal acting weapon was her face: shadowed, lifeless, or lit with megawatt ecstasy.

There were equally formidable turns from Eric Halfvarson’s Hunding and Rosalind Plowright’s Fricka — neither of them partners I’d wish to come to home to. Perhaps this theatre of the body worked its biggest magic on Terfel’s Wotan. He’s a God, yes, with the vocal heft to match (just about). But when the fury, pleadings and prevarications emerge from a man in nonchalant dark dress, the human side of Wotan’s predicament really hits home: termagant wife, disobedient daughter, failing ideals, the price of compromise.

To conclude, minor quibbles. Glorious tone, yes, from the Royal Opera House Orchestra, but not always enough Wagnerian muscle from Antonio Pappano.

Lisa Gasteen’s Brünnhilde: full marks for an outrageous outfit (chain-mail top, slit skirt, bare leg) though it did not clarify the characterisation’s mixed messages.

Yet none of these seriously dampened the night’s spectacular impact.