The wind has veered round northerly and blown into Edinburgh the massed forces of the Hamburg Philharmonic and the Choir of the Hamburg State Opera. The sting of the salt, the terror of the tempest and the driving wind were omnipresent, despite the fact that the lights were up in the Usher Hall and everyone was in evening dress. Simone Young, making her Edinburgh conducting debut, wasn’t going to take any risks: this concert performance was to be nothing short of the real thing.

In some aspects, anyway. Her relentlessly driven pacing ensured that the opera was over in two hours, 20 minutes. Act swept forward into act: exciting, yes, as a hyped-up audience showed in its ecstatic applause. But with a little more judicious weight and measure it could have been more exciting still.

Franz Grundheber as the Dutchman proved the point in the power he drew from Wagner’s music, simply through taking the weight of each word. His was a deeply moving performance, from the ache of pain through each long vowel in Die Frist ist um, to his hollow tones of despair and disbelief. The physical distance between each character was eloquent. Grundheber remained far right, moving slowly and wearily towards centrestage, barely making eye contact.

The Danish soprano Eva Johansson was a disappointingly coarse and one-dimensional Senta. By contrast, the Daland of Diogenes Randes was minutely expressive, with Nikolai Schukoff as a fervent Erik and Jun-Sang Hun a mellifluous Steuermann.

At times, this almost became The Dutchman: the musical as Young, leaping into the air, revved up the dance rhythms within the score, inspiring the chorus to some robustly focused spinning and roistering.