In Wagner-mad Spain, it comes as something of a surprise that Santiago Calatrava’s bold, ultra-modern Palau de les Arts Reina Sofia, in Valencia, is the setting for what is claimed to be the country’s first indigenous staging of Wagner’s Ring tetralogy as a compact cycle. For a building that opened just under four years ago, and now at the end of only its third season as an opera-producing entity, the Valencia Ring is an astonishing achievement, especially when one considers that the veteran Austrian intendente, Helga Schmidt, has effectively created a company from scratch.

Valencia’s second summer Festival del Mediterrani makes full use of Calatrava’s Moby Dick of a building, which looks as if it has swallowed a cruise liner and gobbled up the vegetation of a nearby desert island as a side dish. In addition to the main 1,400-seat opera theatre, it has a 1,500-seat auditorium for symphony concerts, a 400-seat chamber theatre and a 400-seat recital space. A £300m symbol of civic braggadocio, it takes pride of place at the prow of Valencia’s City of Arts and Science, along the serpentine garden that was once the River Turia.

Schmidt has commissioned a futuristic yet timeless and mythical Ring from the Catalan theatre collective La Fura dels Baus: specifically the director, Carlus Padrissa, in collaboration with Franc Aleu (video projections), Roland Olbeter (scenography), Chu Uroz (multimedia costumes) and Peter Van Praet (lighting), as well as a small army of acrobatic extras and performing stagehands, who play Nibelungs in Rheingold, slain heroes in Walküre and the dragon Fafner’s tentacles in Siegfried. At the end of the first opera, they dangle from the flies like suspended skydivers, representing Valhalla, which is illustrated in Aleu’s breathtaking video images as a mesh sculpture of a crouching man, made up of the spread-eagled bodies of the slain. High-definition pictures are back-projected onto movable screens, and the gods swoop around the stage on personal cranes manipulated by stagehands (the fiery demigod Loge, Britain’s John Daszak, has to make do with a mechanised scooter).

Donner’s hammer blow — smashing a golden orb to smithereens of flying nuggets — near the end of Rheingold is stunningly realised, and Aleu takes us on a virtual roller­coaster ride for the descent to an extravagantly mechanised Nibelheim (Rheingold), Wotan’s ride over the mountaintops for his encounter with Erda (Siegfried), and Siegfried’s Rhine Journey to a Mammon-worshipping, dehumanised Gibichung Hall (Götter­dämmerung). Less impressive are the limply choreographed Ride of the Valkyries and Brünn-hilde’s punishment, in which she is put to sleep on what looks like a giant birthday cake.

Die Walküre exposes Padrissa’s limitations as a director of singer-actors: his production is a triumph of technology and acrobatics. But it captures the essential message of the Ring, outlined in the earth goddess Erda’s warning, that lust for untrammelled wealth and power leads to natural catastrophe.

From the musical point of view, this Ring is an unqualified success, thanks to the experienced hand of Zubin Mehta in the pit and the marvellous young Orquestra de la Comunitat Valenciana, already a Ring ensemble to be reckoned with, offering a sonorous depth of Wagnerian sound and transparent accompanying textures, so the singers’ words cross the footlights effortlessly.

The cast includes seasoned Ring­sters such as Placido Domingo, an eternally heroic Siegmund, Eva-Maria Westbroek, a passionate, radiant Sieglinde; the black-voiced Matti Salminen as Fasolt, Hunding and Hagen, and Anna Larsson, Gerhard Siegel and Franz-Josef Kapellmann. New to me were Juha Uusitalo’s tireless Wotan/Wanderer and Jennifer Wilson’s heftily built, stodgily acted Brünnhilde: nobody’s idea of a redemptive heroine, but it’s a long time since I have heard such a gleaming, thrilling top C at the end of the Siegfried duet.

Lance Ryan’s wondrously youthful, wild, delinquently dreadlocked young Siegfried is a bit narrow of tone, but excellent with the text, musical and fearless at the top of the range. If he sounded tired in Götterdämmerung, he was touching in his death scene. Salminen’s Hagen remains one of the best ever after 30 years of singing the role. This is one of the most consistently well sung Rings of recent times. Schmidt plans to repeat it in 2013, the Wagner bicentenary. Before that, in 2011, the complete cycle will be presented at Florence’s Maggio Musicale.

On the days off between Walküre and Siegfried, I popped over to Barcelona for the Liceu’s bizarre new production of Salome, starring the Swedish soprano Nina Stemme — Covent Garden’s forthcoming Isolde — in her first stab at Strauss’s man-eating “little princess”. She looks mature for what the composer prescribed as “a 16-year-old with the voice of Isolde”, but glamorous, too, and she suits Guy Joosten’s odd modern-dress production. Her dramatic soprano effortlessly rides the orchestral tumult conjured by Michael Boder. After she kisses the Baptist’s copiously bleeding head, the singer of Jokanaan — a woolly, blustery Mark Delavan — reappears to shock her to death. Interesting, I suppose, but to what purpose?

Apart from Stemme, Robert Brubaker’s neurotic Herod — a decaying Peter Stringfellow lookalike in gangster shades — and Jane Henschel’s deliciously boozy dumpling of a Herodias, in a sequined scarlet frock, made the strongest impressions. The production will go to Brussels in the 2011-12 season.

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