A deal with the wonderful Mariinsky Theatre of St Petersburg has guaranteed performances by the Russians at the Wales Millennium Centre at least in the short term.

They’ve already presented a vivid production of Wagner’s Ring cycle of operas under Valery Gergiev, their Muscovite livewire and artistic director, and in their second visit they were here for the weekend in celebration of the WMC’s fifth anniversary.

They opened with an opera gala including a concert version of the last act of Die Walkure, the second of the four Ring cycle operas, featuring Bryn Terfel as Wotan.

Gala concerts – with their samplers from this work and that – are primarily reasons for celebration. The Russians had much to lay before us, not least their formidable orchestra.

Gergiev the workhorse takes even Wagner’s monumental Ring in his stride, and though any non-staged extract must needs appear anaemic it was the Russian element that was immediately evident in Die Walkure.

Opera houses the world over would salivate over the Mariinsky’s team of flying Valkyries. All the vocal summits were reached with Terfel, a Welsh ambassador linking arms with the ambassadorial Russians, ruling the roost.

If Larisa Gogolevskaya (Brunnhilde) and Mlada Khudolei (Sieglinde) were treading faintly uncomfortable terrain, there were Russian voices galore in the first half.

Sergei Alexashkin and tenor Sergei Skorokhodov in extracts from Rachmaninov’s Aleko typified voices that tap hidden soulful resources, and Alexei Markov and Victoria Yastrebova in the painful final scene from Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin could not have been more at home.