Opera: Die Walkure, Royal Opera House, London<!-- none onestar twostar threestar fourstar fivestar -->

The Royal Opera Ring moves into phase two, and long before Loge's fire descends for the flame-grilling denouement the temperature is through the roof. Director Keith Warner's thing for ceiling fans is cooling no one's ardour – least of all Antonio Pappano's. It is as if he and his sensational orchestra have found a way of harnessing the energy from Wagner's stormy prelude. For four gruelling hours their concentration and intensity never let up.

And it's there in the staging, too. As the strobe-strafed storm rages we discover Sieglinde in the grip of labour pains. Her phantom pregnancy comes on like a prophecy and points up the close proximity of her twin and soon-to-be lover Siegmund.

She is the Dutch soprano Eva-Marie Westbroek, whose handsome middle voice has the essential womanly bloom, and he is a young New Zealander, Simon O'Neill, with a virile way with words and a top register of real bite. And how beautifully Warner plays up the chemistry between them: the static-like shock of the first accidental touch, the reassuring way she tastes the water before handing him the cup – a gesture of real intimacy.

But all eyes and ears were on John Tomlinson's Wotan and the shift in dynamics that Bryn Terfel's sudden departure from this Ring will inevitably have precipitated. As his "lawless band of valkyries" (as Rosalind Plowright's tightly corseted Fricka calls them) invade the stage at the start of Act II – a telling new addition from Warner – Tomlinson's weathered demeanour chimes well with the idea that Wotan is more himself as the ageing, bearskin-coated hippie than he is as the respectable, dinner-jacketed god that Fricka wants him to be. Terfel's youth played against him here, and in his sparring with Lisa Gasteen's robustly tomboyish Brünnhilde there wasn't the sense that father and daughter might be about to bike off and share Woodstock together.

Tomlinson is a force of nature in the role. His is a Wotan torn between the dictates of heart and duty. And though the high tessitura of the final scene proves cruelly testing, the sheer weight of his experience fortifies him. His fury at Brünnhilde is born of loving too much; he wants to forgive her, to exercise a father's free will. But as a god he cannot. No production of the Ring has ever made this clearer: no wonder the last passionate kiss, full on the lips, is so devastating. With it Wotan crosses the line – as god, as father. Wonderful stuff.

In rep to 28 October (020-7304 4000)