Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg

Just emerged from the Glyndebourne Die Meistersinger – one if the greatest evenings I’ve ever had in a theatre. Stephen Fry (Twitter)
First among the many great strengths of Glyndebourne’s new production is Gerald Finley. The Telegraph
Finley’s Sachs is possessed by poetry from start to finish. I can’t imagine a greater one. Jessica Duchen
Finley… is extraordinary both vocally and dramatically. The Observer
Hans Sachs could well prove to be the pinnacle of his career. The Independent on Sunday
…the real triumph is Gerald Finley’s magnificent central performance The Daily Mail

Composer: Richard Wagner
Libretto: Richard Wagner
Venue and Dates:

Glyndebourne
21, 25, 29 May, 2, 6, 10, 14, 18, 22, 26 June 2011

Conductor: Vladimir Jurowski
Stage Director: David McVicar
Designer: Vicki Mortimer
Lighting Designer: Paule Constable
Movement Director: Andrew George
Fight Director: Nicholas Hall
Performers:

Hans Sachs, Shoemaker: Gerald Finley
Veit Pogner, Goldsmith: Alastair Miles
Kunz Vogelgesang, Furrier: Colin Judson
Konrad Nachtigall, Tinsmith: Andrew Slater
Sixtus Beckmesser, Town clerk: Johann Martin Kränzle
Fritz Kothner, Baker: Henry Waddington
Balthasar Zorn, Pewterer:  Alasdair Elliott
Ulrich Eisslinger, Grocer: Adrain Thompson
Augustin Moser, Tailor: Daniel Norman
Hermann Ortel, Soap-boiler: Robert Poulton
Hans Schwarz, Stocking-weaver: Maxim Maikhailow
Hans Foltz, Coppersmith: Graeme Broadbent
Walther von Stolzing, a young Franconian Knight: Marco Jentzsch
David, Sachs’s Apprentice: Topi Lehtipuu
Eva, Pogner’s daughter: Anna Gabler
Magdalene, Eva’s Nurse: Michaela Selinger
A Night Watchman: Mats Almgren

Notes: Gerry’s role debut

Video clips courtesy of Glyndebourne & Youtube

Interview with Gerry for Reuters after the first night performance

There were circus performers on stage for the Glyndebourne premiere of Wagner’s epically long “Die Meistersingers von Nuremberg” last Saturday, but the real high-wire act was baritone Gerald Finley singing the main part.

The music press and the blogosphere had been abuzz for weeks about whether Finley’s not-epically-huge voice would be up to tackling the longest role in the baritone repertoire at the posh English summer opera venue south of London.

On the night, the cheers and standing ovation for the 51-year-old Canadian said it all, as did the glowing reviews.

“Finley, silencing concerns that the role would defeat him, is extraordinary both vocally and dramatically,” Tim Ashley wrote in The Guardian. And he was not alone.

“I think my determination was to make sure I got through the piece with all guns blazing,” Finley, taking a much deserved four-day rest between performances, told Reuters this week.

“It was a personal determination to make me know to the core of my soul that this is a role that I should be doing and I was more determined than ever to do that on opening night.

“But really, I could have sung on and on, all night, which is a really great feeling. Yeah.”

Here’s what else the man who mixes roles from radio presenter Howard Stern in “Anna Nicole” to Wagner’s poet-shoemaker Hans Sachs to Debussy’s Prince Golaud in the mystical “Pelleas et Melisande,” plus a lot of Mozart, had to say about preparing to sing Sachs, recovering from singing Sachs, and what Wagner role he’s going to do next.

Q: This has been a big year for you, including singing Stern in the hugely popular “Anna Nicole” at the Royal Opera House, Golaud at the Met and now Sachs at Glyndebourne. Ever feel you need to pinch yourself to be sure you’re not dreaming? A: “When I looked at the year and thought four new roles… hmmm… ending with Hans Sachs, now that’s perhaps a little crazy. But each has been a delightful project and Sachs is a wonderful way to finish the season. It is a gruelling thing but I think it’s one of those things where hopefully one gets into a groove and they’re paced nicely. With four days between shows there’s enough recovery time and hopefully rejuvenation time, too.”

Q: Why Glyndebourne, which has only done one other Wagner opera since it was founded in the 1930s, and why now in your career?

A: “Fundamentally my whole idea about doing Hans Sachs as a career kind of step was that certainly it would have to be in a very nurturing environment. Glyndebourne has been my ‘comfy sofa’ for the last 25 years, having started in the chorus, and a lot of the most wonderful elements of my career have happened here, including the opening of the new theatre in 1994 when I sang Figaro.

“This repertoire has been on my radar, not in terms of thinking I have a very large voice and that I’m going to be walking into the Wagnerian culture right away and certainly starting with Hans Sachs it’s a little bit of an odd introduction to the whole Wagnerian repertoire. It’s simply a timing issue…and fundamentally this is the right place to do this role, in the environment of a small theatre with wonderful musicians. It gives me a chance to really bed it in. It’s a fairly public debut but by the same token…I feel the most comfortable as a person in this environment.”

Q: So where next in the vast Wagner universe?

A: “Wolfram in ‘Tannhauser’ and Amfortas in ‘Parsifal’.

Q: Does this mean another wonderful Mozartean has been lost to the Wagner world forever?

A: “I would say I’m progressing along that road but I wouldn’t say I’ve turned into a Wagnerian by any means. I would hope that growth and the ongoing relation I have with the music will allow me to perform it in places and circumstances where hopefully they will be happy to have me.”

Q: Must have been one heck of a cast party after that seven-hour-long premiere on Saturday.

A: “Yes, oh yes. It was great.”

(Wagner’s “Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg” in rotation at the Glyndebourne Opera Festival through June 26. www.glyndebourne.com)

Photos

Reviews

Jessica Duchen’s Music Blog, 22 May 2011

Rapture Day: Die Meistersinger von Glyndebourne

While American evangelicals were preparing for those with the right kind of beliefs to be swept up in a ‘rapture’ to heaven, Glyndebourne offered something rather similar – yet fortuitously real – to its own beticketed denizens: the opening night of its biggest-ever endeavour, the house’s very first go at Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg. It’s Wagner’s heftiest and sunniest, a sort of benign brontosaurus of an opera that starts at 3pm and doesn’t clock out until shortly before 10pm. After the great success of the first-ever Glynditz Wagner, Tristan und Isolde, expectations ran high. I attended the dress rehearsal, but had to be good and keep shtum until today was over…

David McVicar excels at productions that are deeply rooted in the characters (as all fine productions should be) and appear naturalistic thanks to their wealth of detail. No exception, this. What is exceptional, though, is its sheer, fabulous, irresistible visual gorgeousness, for which very many more than three cheers go to designer Vicki Mortimer. The production and design root the action firmly in the time and the town: we’re in the era of Wagner’s childhood, the early 19th century, but Nuremberg is still medieval and you feel you’re walking into it and meeting the inhabitants. (Among the inhabitants you meet, btw, is the lovely Martha Jurowski, Vladimir’s teenage daughter. Look out for her in the crowd…)

The basic shell is the arches and pillars of the church in which Eva and Walther eyeball one another at the beginning. The church is filled with vast murals; the full congregation with restive apprentices and well-behaved burghers’ children, is in the background. We have Walther’s viewpoint, the outsider looking in, hesitantly approaching in the hope of joining this prosperous yet rather volatile community. Walther is the first of several isolated, outsider-ish characters – the others turning out to be Beckmesser and Sachs himself. The second act takes place around a statue and fountain, with the carved wooden balconies of Pogner’s house and Sachs’s on opposite sides. But it’s the third that is most revealing of all.

The final scene in the meadow, with fire-eaters on stilts and huge numbers of jugglers, singers, dancers and actors bustling around a wooden pavilion, drew amazed applause from a thrilled dress-rehearsal crowd of friends and family, something that doesn’t happen too often (we’re a hardened old lot, us). But in the scene before that, we’re in Sachs’s house. His excellently messy desk is that of a poet, a creative – piled haphazardly with books and papers. In the centre of the room is a portrait of his deceased wife and children, covered with a curtain that he removes briefly, then replaces. Furniture is stored in heaps, as if it has sat there ever since the deaths of those in the painting, however long ago that may be. We’re not only in his house, but in his head.

Meistersinger is an overwhelming work, of course, but it can have thankless elements: Hans Sachs and his apprentice, David, are the only truly rounded characters, though the deliciously odious Beckmesser is close behind. It’s too easy for Eva to slip into cardboardy cuteness and for Walther to be one of those doltish Wagnerian tenors with more brawn than brain – though admittedly he needs brawn to get through the role at all. One operatic friend of mine remarks that Walther reduces most tenors, by the time they reach the Prize Song, to sounding as if they’ve been “gargling with hydrochloric acid”.

But McVicar has solved most of the potential awkwardnesses of staging with one phenomenal explosive device. It is: Gerald Finley as Hans Sachs.

Some surprise went around when the casting was initially announced: surely Finley would be too youthful, too lightweight, not quite Terfel-ish enough? Ahaa – but stupendous as Terfel was last year at WNO and the Proms, this concept is something quite different. First of all, not only does Finley, in his debut in the role, convince us that it’s a piece of cake, but his voice is  utterly, phenomenally beautiful. With the quality of the tone, the phrasing, the enunciation and the sense of character, Finley’s Sachs is possessed by poetry from start to finish. I can’t imagine a greater one.

It’s the inner conflicts of Sachs and Eva (the lyrical Anna Gabler) that drive the drama. This exceedingly handsome Sachs – Finley is one of the world’s finest Don Giovannis, remember – is still in devastated widowerhood and part of him loathes his own attraction to Eva; this makes it perfectly plausible that Eva too has a divided heart, with a crush on Sachs that’s still relatively fresh. Instead of teasing him about possibly winning her hand in the contest, you feel that a good two-thirds of her would genuinely like him to do so. So if Walther is a bit of a dolt – or in this case, a drip – it helps, rather than hinders the drama, leaving enough room in Eva’s emotions for Sachs too. The gangly Marco Jentzsch does a reasonable job as Walther, but if this Sachs were to participate in the contest, the baritone would sing the tenor off the stage, fin.

What about Beckmesser – the critic Eduard Hanslick in disguise, say some? He’s an interesting creation: clearly an outsider, more somberly dressed and darker haired than the rest – but with hirsute style strongly suggestive of pictures of Wagner himself. Still, he does a shrug at the end of Act 1 that makes one wonder if McVicar is succumbing to the “Beckmesser is an anti-Semitic caricature” line of thought. If so, though, the point isn’t overstated. Thereafter he’s more Buster Keaton than Shylock – and the episode in which he invades Sachs’ house and steals the Prize Song is hilariously akin to Simon’s Cat (the “Sticky Tape” film…). Bravo to Johannes Martin Kränzle, another brilliant voice and fine actor, and to the doughty Rachel Masters, accompanying him from the pit on the Celtic harp.

More singers to single out are Alastair Miles as Pogner, Michaela Selinger as Magdalene and Mats Almgren as the Night Watchman. And the chorus is a knockout. McVicar has chosen the period in which Wagner’s psyche would have been first formed, and there are plenty of children on stage: maybe one of those small 19th-century boys could grow up to be Big Richard himself? And with Sachs musing upon the origins of all the repressed anger, once again in the context of 19th-century Bavaria there’s a sense that Wagner may have been a little more perceptive than we usually give him credit for.

There’s one big clanger: the choreography. In such a true-to-life, detailed, historically convincing production, if the dances don’t match, it really jars. This choreography works against rather than with the music and looks like a rough mashup of line dancing, disco moves and pelvic thrusts that seem to say ‘oooh-aarrgh-look-at-us-earthy-townsfolk’. Please ditch and rethink before the revival.

Down t’pit, Vladimir Jurowski, tackling his very first Meistersinger too, has picked an unusual way to deal with Big Orchestra in Smallish House syndrome. For many quieter, dialogue-based episodes, he cuts the orchestral sections down considerably – in the case of the first violins, to just six players. It so happens that Tom is no.5 and the increased stress levels have induced the consumption of far too much chocolate, so I’ll leave it to everyone else to remark upon whether or not the tactic works.

There’s no excuse not to see the show, sold out though it is: it’s being cinecast on 26 June to cinemas all over the country (and, intriguingly, to the Science Museum). Plus The Guardian will be live-streaming it online.

Mark Ronan’s Theatre reviews, 22 May 2011

This new production of Meistersinger by David McVicar elicited thunderous applause at the end. And what an end it was, with Hans Sachs’s monologue being given its full force in a way I’ve not seen before.

When Walther refuses the award of Mastership from Pogner, Gerald Finley as Sachs draws him aside to stage right, and his first few lines, Verachtet mir die Meister nicht …, begging Walther not to spurn the Masters, are sung privately to him while the others talk in confusion among themselves. As Sachs moves forward with his great monologue, explaining how the Masters have nurtured true art through difficult times in the past, he moves to stage left and grasps Beckmesser by the arm. This is a nice touch because the poor old town clerk, pompous ass though he is, has made such a frightful mess of things and was moved to shed a tear as Walther sang his prize song. Then as Sachs continues to develop his great monologue he rushes round the stage urgently addressing everyone. His Hab’ Acht!, when he warns of German Art falling under false rule, is a wonderful moment. There is nothing sententious here, nothing to be taken amiss, just an appeal not to be led astray by false and foreign ideas, and it resonated with me as a striking comment against that awful 12-year rule known as the Third Reich. The chorus comes in with enormous force, Eva places the wreath on Sachs’s head, and he pitches it up to the revellers at the top of the bandstand. The curtain stayed up, the audience roared their approval, and the performers and production team on stage received a hugely vocal standing ovation.

Some say that Glyndebourne is too small a venue for Meistersinger, and it’s only their second Wagner production, but it was terrific. The designs by Vicki Mortimer are simply wonderful. I loved Sachs’s study in the first part of Act III with the wonderful summer morning light entering through the window. Paule Constable’s lighting is superbly calm, but also thrillingly dramatic as that warning shaft of light emerges in Act II at the moment Walther and Eva are about to elope in the darkness.

This is just before Beckmesser arrives to serenade Eva, and here and in the other two acts, Johannes Martin Kränzle was perfect in both voice and dramatic interpretation. He took full advantage of David McVicar’s clever production ideas. When he creeps into Sachs’s study in Act III the music allows time for plenty of side play and it was very funny: his tumbling over the bench, the paper sticking on his hand, and then his shoe, the boxes falling out of the shelves. It was all done with perfect comic timing.

Kränzle and Finley as Beckmessser and Sachs were the stars of this performance, and Finley opened out Sachs’s role in interesting ways. In the Flieder monologue of Act II, as he thinks of the Masters’ rejection of Walther’s Act I performance, he exhibits huge frustration. And in the Wahn monologue of Act III he shows enormous anguish, even kicking a chair over at the beginning, but calming down as he sings of his beloved Nuremberg and the customs and contentment in deed and work. Then after he expostulates about the events of the previous night, the London Philharmonic under the brilliant direction of Vladimir Jurowski, rises beautifully to the challenge of Sachs’s Der Flieder war’s: Johannisnacht! (It was the Elder-tree: Midsummer’s Eve!) Nun aber kam Johannistag! (But now there comes Midsummer’s Day!). These great monologues by Sachs are almost always stirringly sung, but Finley brought them out with huge emotion. A great performance.

His interaction with the other cast members was excellent, and the quintet in Act III was beautifully sung with Marco Jentzsch, Anna Gabler, Michaela Selinger, and Topi Lehtipuu in the roles of Walther, Eva, Magdalena and David. Alastair Miles was excellent as Eva’s father Pogner, and Marco Jentzsch was a strongly voiced Walther with a heroic tone. Anna Gabler also sang strongly as Eva, but perhaps a bit too forcefully for my taste. When Eva goes to see Sachs early in Act III, I’m used to her being very anxious, but here she seemed ill-tempered, so that rather than seeing her as a glorious future wife for Walther, I wondered if he knew what he was letting himself in for. Also in Act II when she hits Sachs she appeared more as a leading lady for Richard Strauss rather than Wagner. Her young nurse Magdalena often comes over as the more forceful and difficult of the two, but here it was the reverse, and Michaela Selinger’s well-sung Magdelena seemed perfectly charming. While on the topic of performance, Mats Almgren sang beautifully as the Night Watchman.

Among many lovely points about this production, I rather liked Augustin Moser, one of the mastersingers, bringing his small daughter into Act I where she sits on his lap until Frau Moser retrieves her. This was a nice touch, but I was not so wild about the fight at the end of that act. There were more women in nightshirts than men, and the choreography for the rent-a-mob fight crew was just too much. This is supposed to be an impromptu row caused by all the noise, and it should look like it. By contrast, the choreography for the dance in the final scene of Act III was very good: the girls from Fürth swishing their skirts, slapping their thighs and dancing in circular formation in the bandstand, with the boys joining in on the outside. I loved the jugglers, particularly those on stilts — they were brilliant. And the way Pogner brought Eva in on his arm reminded me briefly of the recent Royal Wedding. Then immediately Sachs came on the chorus made a glorious sound, and Finley’s Euch macht ihr’s leicht, mir macht ihr’s schwer . . . (For you it’s easy, but you make it hard for me . . .) was riveting. This was Finley’s first Hans Sachs, and as he matures into the role it will only get better.

My view of the stage from the upper circle was perfect, and if you can get ticket returns anywhere in the theatre, go for it at any price. Performances continue until June 26 — for more details click here.

Edward Seckerson, The Independent on Sunday, 22 May 2011

Some pieces you just have to trust and trust implicitly. When a text is as good as Wagner’s Die Meistersinger it’s a wise director who takes a step back and let the words, the characters, the bountiful score go forth and prosper. Some might call David McVicar’s first Glyndebourne staging “traditional” but that’s something of a dirty word in opera nowadays and to imply dullness rather than due diligence would never do. McVicar is better than that and when, as here, he is the soul of discretion there is a very good reason for it.

There is the little matter of the update to 19th century bonnets and empire lines lending a more “painterly” visual tone and perhaps underlining the burgeoning trend towards German nationalism at this time. The designer Vicki Mortimer even frames the stage like an old master playing out the action of all three acts beneath a vaulted canopy so ornate as to suggest cloth not stone. But the opera is not about “nationalism”, German or otherwise; it’s about pride – civic pride, certainly – but mostly it’s about the progressiveness of great Art: the inspiration that breaks rules and re-evaluates the old in the light of the new. It’s about the writing of a great song and all that is at stake in the writing of it.

Wagner’s entire score is songful, pouring forth benevolent counterpoint from prelude to final chorus. And perhaps the greatest joy of this evening was in hearing Vladimir Jurowski and the London Philharmonic Orchestra weaving so rich and detailed a narrative. The playing was at times extraordinarily beautiful with solo oboe and clarinet distilling and elevating so many special moments.

It was also a significant night for Gerald Finley whose Hans Sachs could well prove to be the pinnacle of his career. I had thought him unlikely casting but the beauty and intelligence of his singing, the clarity of his words and toughness and charisma of his persona dominated the stage. He was also for once credibly attractive to Eva (Anna Gabler) and the perfect counterpart to Johannes Martin Kränzle’s brilliant and believable Beckmesser. Marco Jentzsch had youth and stamina on his side as Walther von Stolzing but tonal beauty and rapture eluded him. Alastair Miles’ Pogner was in every sense the voice of experience.

We left Glyndebourne with the chorus’s “hymn to Sachs” still resonating across the Sussex downs. It was a moment that clearly floored Finley as much as the standing ovation greeting his curtain-call.

Tim Ashley, the Observer, 22 May 2011

Nothing in David McVicar’s new production of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg at Glyndebourne is quite what you might expect. In a recent interview, McVicar spoke eloquently of how he was troubled by German nationalistic elements within this otherwise “heart-warming” opera, by Wagner’s antisemitic characterisation of Beckmesser, and by the work’s association with the Nazis, who accorded it propagandistic status.

He is, of course, by no means the first person to voice such concerns, but if as a result you were expecting something strident or hard-edged, then you’d be wrong. For all its exuberance, this is in some respects a muted interpretation. McVicar’s treatment of its politics is carefully woven into its psychological and emotional fabric rather than flung in the audience’s face.

McVicar updates the opera to post-Napoleonic Germany, a period which saw the burgeoning of nationalism in the aftermath of invasion.

Beckmesser (Johannes Martin Kränzle) looks like Giacomo Meyerbeer, the German-Jewish, Paris-based composer, whom Wagner detested. Walther (Marco Jentzsch) is a charismatic army officer. The Mastersingers themselves, meanwhile, are tea-slurping bourgeois philistines who have already decided that Beckmesser is not really one of their number and are also suspicious of Gerald Finley’s bookish, intellectual Sachs.

The end is clever and disturbing. Walther, all charm, shiny boots and braid, delivers the prize song while Beckmesser sits sobbing uncontrollably in a corner. “Holy German art,” as the staging reminds us, embraces Dürer, Bach, Goethe and Schiller. But during his final paean, Sachs also indicates that the Beckmessers and, by implication, the Meyerbeers of this world, also have their rightful place in any list of “masters”. His gesture goes unheeded by the crowd, and a chill creeps into the final scenes of jubilation.

There are occasional lapses. It’s hard to understand why this particular gang of Mastersingers have become such a source of civic pride. McVicar’s decision to stage the apprentices’ choruses as Broadway-style song and dance routines, meanwhile, strikes a false note in a production otherwise remarkable for the detailed naturalism of its performances.

Finley, silencing concerns that the role would defeat him, is extraordinary both vocally and dramatically. There are no problems here with slips in intonation or a lack of lustre in his tone that marred some of his work last year. Few interpreters, meanwhile, have registered quite so vividly Sachs’s intense feelings for his late wife, or the emotional pain involved in his realisation that a relationship with Anna Gabler’s Eva could only result in disaster for them both. Jentzsch sounds good, and generates considerable erotic charge in his scenes with Eva. Only Gabler, lacking in vocal radiance, occasionally disappoints. The swagger of his conducting is immensely appealing in this work: once past his rather driven account of the prelude, he settles into a performance that nicely the music’s wonderful ebb and flow.

George Hall, The Stage, 23 May 2011

Glyndebourne opens the festival season by taking on its biggest ever challenge. This production of Wagner’s epic comedy is a major achievement, if an imperfect one.

Working with designer Vicki Mortimer, David McVicar moves the period forward from the mid-16th century to around 1820. The first act, set in a church, is wonderfully presented, though some of its fixed elements work less well later on – neither the second-act riot nor the final scene of communal merrymaking has enough space. Replacing the traditional procession of the guilds, groups of dancers and other entertainers bring the civic celebrations perilously close to kitsch.

The first act’s finely detailed performances are not consistently followed through. Brilliantly realised though Johannes Martin Kranzle’s Beckmesser often is, the added pratfalls seem a betrayal of the production’s higher aspirations. The rewritten end of the opera is thoughtful, if not entirely convincing.

Vocally, some performances prove fallible. Marco Jentzsch’s Walther keeps faith with the notes but his tone rarely shines. Topi Lehtipuu struggles with David’s high-lying part. Anna Gabler’s Eva is on the cool side.

At the centre of the piece, Gerald Finley’s Hans Sachs holds firm throughout the long evening, though the character’s humanity and warmth are not yet fully on show. Alastair Miles’ Pogner is vocally impressive though dramatically bland.

In the pit, conductor Vladimir Jurowski secures a solid performance that takes intermittent flight and will surely gain in clarity and spaciousness as the run proceeds

Rupert Christensen, The Telegraph, 23 May 2011

First among the many great strengths of Glyndebourne’s new production of Wagner’s comedy is Gerald Finley, performing Hans Sachs for the first time.

His singing had all the verbal clarity and incisiveness – nothing forced, nothing mushy – for which he is celebrated, and he radiated the wise scepticism that makes Sachs the most attractive character in Wagner’s oeuvre. Finley may not have the bellows for a big house, but at Glyndebourne he was perfect.

He was up against an equally distinguished Beckmesser, sensitively uncaricatured by Johannes-Martin Kränzle. His final, Malvolio-like humiliation was oddly moving. I didn’t sense any Semitic element to the characterisation, but I have read that this was intended.

Marco Jentzsch made a winningly tall young chocolate soldier of a Walther, even if his Prize Song suggested a vocal technique in need of further refinement. Michaela Selinger was an enchanting Magdalena, and Pogner (Alastair Miles), Kothner (Henry Waddington), the Nightwatchman (Mats Almgren) and the masters were all very fine. Glyndebourne’s chorus was in cracking form too – Wach auf (Hitler’s favourite, alas) made my spine tingle.

Now my niggling reservations creep in. Anna Gabler’s Eva was nothing special, and that delightful singer Topi Lehtipuu was having an off night as David. But what lowered the musical temperature for me was Vladimir Jurowski’s conducting: from a loud, fast account of the Overture, he kept the score on such a tight rein that its warmth was frozen. The LPO played on doggedly, soullessly.

Warwick Thompson, Bloomberg, 23 May 2011

Glyndebourne Stirs Loud Thrills
With more than 200 performers in front of a 1,200-seat auditorium, Glyndebourne’s “Die Meistersinger” has the highest stage-audience ratio in the company’s history. It makes for an eardrum-rattling show.

The intimate countryside U.K. opera house has picked Wagner’s most densely populated piece for its second-ever production of a work by the composer. (The first was “Tristan und Isolde” in 2003).

When the groups of apprentices start entering in the final procession, climaxing in the arrival of the 12 mastersingers themselves, the decibel level is almost indecently thrilling.

With ex-Glyndebourne chorus member Gerald Finley singing his first Hans Sachs, there are further delights too. His warm, overtone-rich voice sails over the orchestra, and his complex interpretation of the cobbler-poet as world weary and angry is intriguing. The scenic details are telling. He convincingly trims leather at his cobblers’ last, and his fingers are smothered in dye and dirt from his efforts.

David McVicar’s production is handsome, slickly stage managed, and full of fascinating details that illuminate the relationships between characters. On the downside, it feels a tad safe and decorative.

He sets the action in the early 19th century, when the various principalities and dukedoms of Germany were beginning to search for a new form of common identity through art.

Bonnets, Crowds
On paper, that seems like a great idea for an opera about a singing contest that transforms the society that holds it. On stage, the alchemy doesn’t fire up. It’s lovely to look at the gorgeous bonnets, frock coats and Empire-line dresses, and wallow in the well-choreographed crowd scenes. On a deeper level, the updated setting doesn’t offer many new insights into the dynamics of the piece.

On Vicki Mortimer’s set, everything takes place under an impressive piece of stone vaulting in high-Gothic style. That’s wonderful for the opening church scene. It’s slightly curious for the street scene of Act 2. You have to accept that the houses of Sachs and his neighbor Pogner lie under a highly decorated stone canopy. Maybe it’s meant to be a medieval shopping arcade, or maybe not.

The final scene is set in a meadow by a river. It’s really not the sort of place you’d expect to find the same barrel- vaulted chunk of cathedral roof.

Finley’s vocal triumph is matched by Johannes Martin Kranzle as his comical nemesis Beckmesser.

Marco Jentzsch and Topi Lehtipuu don’t quite cut the mustard in the tenor roles of Walter and David, respectively, and both sound strained at the top of their voices. Anna Gabler looks and sounds delightful as the heroine Eva, and Vladimir Jurowski fires on all cylinders in the pit.

If it’s not quite the last word in Meistersingers, this is an undisputed triumph for a small, privately funded company.

Jonathan Lynn, Reuters, 24 May 2011

The idea of mounting Richard Wagner’s five-hour drama at Glyndebourne — the original and for many the ultimate country-house summer opera festival, where the champagne picnic in the stately gardens is as much part of the evening as the music — struck some as incongruous.

But John Christie, who founded the festival at his house in 1934, always wanted to put on Wagner, and had organised a small private performance of part of Meistersinger six years earlier.

And the standing ovations garnered by director David McVicar and baritone Gerald Finley when Glyndebourne opened its 2011 season with its new staging of Die Meistersinger on Saturday showed just how popular it could be.

Die Meistersinger — only the second Wagner opera to be put on at Glyndebourne — is not only the longest but also the warmest and most humorous of the German composer’s pieces.

But its final scene, with calls to honor German art and rid German culture of foreign influences, were exploited by Hitler’s Nazis to back their nationalist and anti-Semitic policies.

Other recent productions too have sought to turn their back on these associations.

In McVicar’s staging of the closing scene, with its procession of town guilds and singers, takes place in a good-natured, carnival atmosphere, recalling nothing more sinister in comparison to the mood in the “Lord of the Rings” film when the hobbits celebrate Bilbo Baggins’s 111th birthday.

When Wagner wrote the opera — first performed in 1868, as Germany was undergoing reunification — he wanted German artists to tap into their cultural traditions and break away from the French influences favored by the ruling elite.

The opera — a tribute to the shared joy of song — takes place in Renaissance Nuremberg where a group of burghers and craftsmen are members of a guild of amateur singers.

One of them, the cobbler Hans Sachs — played by Finley — convinces his fellows of the need to re-invigorate their tired traditions and rules with young talent.

In doing so he smoothes the path of love of the daughter of a fellow guildsman, Eva, for a young nobleman and would-be singer, Walther, dashing the hopes of the pedantic town clerk Beckmesser, who had hoped to win Eva’s hand in a song contest.

Finley, who started his career in the Glyndebourne chorus, was the star of the show with his portrayal of the wise but complex poet and craftsman caught in a midlife crisis.

In Beckmesser — the part played by Glyndebourne founder Christie in his 1928 amateur staging — Wagner was mocking the critics who rejected his own music, which was far ahead of its time and retains a revolutionary force to this day.

McVicar updates the action to the early 19th century — Wagner’s youth — but his realistic staging avoids any distracting directorial gimmicks.

When the curtain rises after the famous overture it reveals the ornate interior of a Gothic church at the climax of divine service — one of many heart-stopping moments in the production.

It also lets the humor of the opera come alive, from the committee meeting deliberations of the singers’ guild, to the antics of the hapless Beckmesser, to the huge town brawl on Midsummer’s Eve in the middle of the opera.

That midsummer setting, underlined by sets suffused with warm lighting, makes Meistersinger ideal for a summer festival.

Glyndebourne typically produces smaller-scale operas, with Mozart, Donizetti, Handel, Dvorak and Britten on the menu this year. Die Meistersinger is by far the largest production in its 77-year history.

“This is without doubt the biggest, most ambitious, in some people’s opinion maddest project that we have ever done at Glyndebourne,” General Director David Pickard said.

For a company that gets no public subsidy and relies on ticket sales, membership fees and donations, putting on such a big opera could be foolhardy at a time of economic uncertainty.

But there were few hints of the weak U.K. economy on Glyndebourne’s lawns, and the festival, where the most expensive seat is 250 pounds ($405), was 96 percent booked up before opening.

Die Meistersinger itself is completely sold out but the final performance in this season on June 26 will also be streamed live on www.glyndebourne.com and screened live at London’s Science Museum and selected venues around Britain.

George Loomis, New York Times, 24 May 2011

Wagner was late in coming to Glyndebourne. The festival’s staging of “Tristan und Isolde” eight years ago was widely viewed as a bold incursion into new territory. Yet had events taken a slightly different turn, Wagner’s operas might have complemented the black-tie picnics on the manicured lawns of the Christie estate in East Sussex as readily as Mozart’s. John Christie, who founded the festival in the early 1930s, thought of creating an “English Bayreuth” and once took the part of Beckmesser in a piano-accompanied performance of Act 3, Scene 1 of “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg” in the estate’s organ room.

Tantalizingly, as detailed in the current program book, a 1953 letter to Christie from Wagner’s granddaughter, Friedelind, indicated interest on the part of her brother Wieland in staging operas at Glyndebourne. As it turned out, Wagner remained ignored, but as the hugely successful “Tristan” demonstrated, the delights of experiencing his works in a 1,200-seat theater are considerable. The 10 performances this year of “Meistersinger,” the festival’s second Wagner undertaking, sold out immediately.

“Meistersinger” is Wagner’s most heartwarming opera, but its status as such is qualified by the composer’s mean-spirited treatment of the town clerk Beckmesser. In a striking example of how stage directors build on (or copy) each other’s work, it is now almost de rigueur to treat benignly the poor creature, who is not only beaten up physically but, even worse, condemned artistically by the entire populace after his disastrous performance in a song competition. This trend in staging receives additional impetus from a theory — based on informed conjecture rather than hard evidence — that Wagner’s treatment of Beckmesser reflects his anti-Semitism.

David McVicar, whose production opened the Glyndebourne season on Saturday, endorsed the theory in an interview in The Guardian newspaper. Yet other directors have gone further in rehabilitating Beckmesser. Mr. McVicar ensures that the town clerk is portrayed with a modicum of dignity, and instead of stalking off after his fiasco, Beckmesser remains present for the subsequent festivities. But he looks miserable as he suffers through them, and when the cobbler-poet Hans Sachs attempts a rapprochement, he turns his back and walks away, small-minded to the end.

Otherwise, Mr. McVicar’s production, which won the enthusiastic approval of the opening night audience, is thoroughly conventional. He has transplanted the action to the early 19th century, a time when the Napoleonic Wars subjected Germany to the threat of foreign domination, which Sachs warns of when extolling “holy German art.” Yet as the Mastersingers kid among themselves, sporting top hats and other colorful attire designed by Vicki Mortimer, the threat of war never intrudes on the good-natured story.

Ms. Mortimer’s décor faithfully represents the church setting of Act 1, a portion of which consisting of archways and a fancifully vaulted ceiling — all in stone — remains oddly in place for subsequent locales, including those outdoors. It tends to make Glyndebourne’s small stage seem even smaller than it is.

Mr. McVicar’s traditional approach might have worked better with ideal singers who fully inhabit their roles. Undertaking the central role of Sachs for the first time, the mellifluous baritone Gerald Finley sings beautifully, making telling moments of each of the famous monologues. His performance is lovely to hear, and the intimacy of Glyndebourne’s theater is crucial in facilitating it. But there are times when Sachs needs to be a more dominant, even rugged figure, and here Mr. Finley’s portrayal needed more presence.

As Walther, the knight who ultimately wins his beloved Eva with his Prize Song, Marco Jentzsch also sings with a voice smaller than usual for the role. Yet his singing often sounds thin and occasionally borders on crooning. Anna Gabler contributes a fluttery rather than pure-voiced Eva, and crucial impassioned utterances lack abandon. As Eva’s father Pogner, Alastair Miles has some good moments but makes a rather crotchety goldsmith. Johannes-Martin Kränzle’s Beckmesser, warmly sung with a richly resonant baritone, deserves a prize here.

Glyndebourne’s music director Vladimir Jurowski, conducting his first staged “Meistersinger,” draws vibrant, responsive playing from the London Philharmonic. He has not yet solved all the issues posed by the work’s sprawling architecture, but his reading is largely persuasive.

Michael Church, The Scotsman, 24 May 2011

THE big surprise about David McVicar’s new production of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg is that it’s so blissfully traditional: nothing outré, no “concept” pushed to its limits – just a lovingly detailed bringing-to-life of Wagner’s medieval
parable about the nature of art.

Vicki Mortimer’s fan-vaulted set does service as the cathedral, the town square, Hans Sachs’s workshop and an open-air grandstand. The action has been brought forward three centuries to Wagner’s time, but the community peopling it has a timeless vividness and authenticity.

Apart from a naff Broadway-style dance routine for the assembled apprentices in Act One, McVicar goes for absolute naturalism, which means that the funny bits really are funny, and the rivalry for the hand of the burgher’s daughter convincingly intense. And the casting is mostly superb. Though Marco Jentsch, as the new Meistersinger “star”, is a touch short on vocal charisma, Johannes Martin Kranzle’s Beckmesser is a brilliant portrait of a town-hall pen-pusher, and Topi Lehtipu’s representation of the qualities required in an aspiring singer is sweetly comic.

But the evening belongs to baritone Gerald Finley, whose incarnation of the cobbler-poet casts an all-embracing glow. Hans Sachs is at once the conscience of the community and Wagner’s own voice, as he ruminates on the tension between hidebound tradition and the necessary newness of all true art, and as he laments the vanity of human existence in his Act Three soliloquy Finley’s singing has never been more beautiful. Here his presence tempers authority with an amused, avuncular tenderness: an unforgettable performance.

The other stars of the evening are conductor Vladimir Jurowski, the London Philharmonic and the Glyndebourne Chorus, who negotiate their multi-part vocal riot with seeming spontaneity and total precision.

David Gillard, The Daily Mail, 25 May 2011

The four-month Sussex summer idyll opens with a cracker — Glyndebourne’s brilliant first-ever staging of Wagner’s richly human, bittersweet comedy about the foibles of love and the enduring power of art.

It’s a massive undertaking for a small house. As Glyndebourne’s Executive Chairman Gus Christie notes in his programme foreword: ‘In practical and financial terms, it is like putting on two new productions at once. There will be 130 cast members on stage.’

They all seemed to be there for the amazing ‘Prize Song’ fairground scene — stilt-walking fire-eaters, jugglers, children, dancers and sightseers, jostling for a place in director David McVicar’s meticulously choreographed finale.

Designer Vicki Mortimer’s costumes — bonnets and Empire line dresses for the ladies, a hussar’s uniform for Walther — update the action to the 19th century, the time of Wagner’s childhood, while the sets are beautifully framed within cathedral-like arches and pillars.

There is radiant playing from the London Philharmonic Orchestra under conductor Vladimir Jurowski and a splendid performance from Johannes Martin Kranzle, endowing the pedantic town clerk, Beckmesser, with all the comedy and pathos of a pompous Malvolio.

The lovers, Eva and Walther (Anna Gabler and Marco Jentzsch) are sometimes vocally lightweight but always credibly portrayed, while Topi Lehtipuu’s energetic David and Michaela Selinger’s delightful Magdalene add solid support.

But the real triumph is Gerald Finley’s magnificent central performance as Nuremburg’s cobbler-philosopher, Hans Sachs. Bryn Terfel, who created such a sensational Sachs for Welsh National Opera last year, is a hard act to follow. But Finley makes the role his own — warm and secure of voice and finding all the passion and compassion in this complex character.

You’re left in little doubt that, had he chosen to take part in the Mastersinger’s song contest, he would undoubtedly have won the beautiful prize — Eva — instead of her brooding young lover. No contest.

The production is a sell-out, so get a seat at the nationwide live cinema screenings on June 26.

John Alison, The Telegraph, 27 May 2011

Along with Jurowski, the evening belongs to Gerald Finley as Hans Sachs. Singing his first Wagner role, and coming to it from outside the tradition of voluminous bass-baritones, Finley makes a particularly vulnerable cobbler-poet, painting a portrait of a widower in mid-life crisis. In place of vocal weight he has musical warmth, making for a powerful “Wahn” monologue.

Johannes-Martin Kränzle’s Beckmesser is a wonderful comic creation, vocally strong and all the more touching for keeping on the right side of caricature. Another notable performance comes from Michaela Selinger’s warm Magdalene, but the other principals are undercast: Anna Gabler’s girlish Eva, Topi Lehtipuu’s thin-voiced David and Marco Jentzsch’s Walther, who lacks the honeyed tone required for a winning Prize Song.

Anna Picard, The Independent on Sunday, 29 May 2011

David McVicar is good on details: the furtive rubbing of an eye in frustration, the brief glance over a shoulder, flickers of doubt, hurt, hope or glee. He can organise a spectacle, marshall a crowd, razzle and dazzle without losing focus on the egg-shell hearts of his protagonists.

Were Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg simply a comedy of small-town politics and mis-timed love, his Glyndebourne production would be a cracker. But his solution to the issues that continue to vex Wagner’s opera is to airbrush them from the picture. In McVicar’s Nuremberg, nationalism is an innocuous extrapolation of civic pride, while Hans Sachs’s homily to holy German art is delivered to a cavalcade of circus acrobats and cherub-faced children.

Perish the critic who quibbles with Biedermeier bonnets and a fire-eater on stilts but this is a far cry from the Handel-to-Haneke collage of German and Austrian artists and thinkers that opened and closed Richard Jones’s incisive Welsh National Opera production. McVicar has set his staging in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, when Wagner and German nationalism were in their infancy. A prelapsarian Meistersinger is not problematic per se. (Though scholars continue to debate evidence of anti-Semitism in the score, most of the angst around this opera derives from its performance history under the Third Reich.) But without deep engagement with the subjects of the custodianship of art and the need for renewal, the work becomes a prolix soap-opera.

Vicki Mortimer’s set encapsulates this tension handsomely in Act I, with a giant mural of Dürer’s Christ Among the Doctors. Son of a goldsmith, Dürer had to leave Nüremberg for inspiration. For Sachs and the other Mastersingers, there is no escape. As heavy as the first blast of C major, Mortimer’s High Gothic ceiling remains in place throughout the opera, and the twilight sky and elder-tree of Act II have little space to breathe their subversive scents. Far from following the sideways tilt of the manuscript on the dropcloth, McVicar plays it straight, softening the bile between Beckmesser and his fellow guildsmen into the chafing of blue- and white-collar workers.

This is, for good or ill, a very human production, and the voices are on a similarly human scale. Styled after Meyerbeer, Johannes Martin Kränzle’s Beckmesser is a social climber – finickety, vulnerable, wracked with shame after his calamitous performance in the contest for Eva’s hand. In Topi Lehtipuu’s fractious impersonation, David looks set to follow Beck-messer’s example more closely than that of Gerald Finley’s Sachs, whose bereavement seems more recent and more crushing than that of Bryn Terfel’s Sachs. In a larger house, and with less sensitive accompaniment than Vladimir Jurowski and the LPO provide, his voice might be too slender. In Glyndebourne, eloquence carries.

Sachs’s tetchiness and tenderness, his pragmatism and ideals, are resolved into an eminently believable character, gleamingly sung with no audible strain. The look of anguish on Anna Gabler’s face as Eva realises what she has forsaken for Walther’s pretty face and aristocratic blood hits hard, though she is upstaged elsewhere by Michaela Selinger’s vivacious Magdalena. Marco Jentzsch’s Walther was sadly underpowered at the first performance but with a tip-top line-up of tea-gulping guildsmen, a thrillingly young chorus and an authoritative Pogner from Alastair Miles, there is much to recommend the production musically. Jurowski’s pacing of the score is fascinating, sometimes basking in splendour, sometimes hurtling, always ravishingly coloured. Circus finale aside, it’s an attractive show. But there has to be more to Die Meistersinger than a parochial comedy.

Clare Colvin, The Sunday Express, 29 May 2011

Glyndebourne launched its most ambitious project yet in opening the 2011 Festival with Wagner’s longest opera. At more than five hours, The Mastersingers of Nuremberg stretches to seven with two sizeable intervals, with a cast of about 120 having to fit on the relatively small stage in the final scene.

Still, David McVicar’s heartwarming production repaid Glyndebourne’s gamble and the sold-out opera is to get a live cinema screen showing on June 26 at the Science Museum in London and in Picturehouse cinemas nationwide.

Wagner based his work on the lives of the 16th-century Nuremberg guild of master singers. McVicar and designer Vicki Mortimer have updated the setting to early in the 19th century; a time of growing nationalism in Germany. The plot centres on the historical singing contest. The town’s goldsmith Pogner, sung by Alastair Miles, promises the hand of his daughter Eva (Anna Gabler) to whoever wins first prize. Enter young knight Walther von Stolzing (Marco Jentzsch) who falls for Eva but knows nothing of song composition. His adversary is bureaucratic town clerk Beckmesser (Johannes Martin Kranzle).

Baritone Gerald Finley as Hans Sachs brings a fascinating slant to the triangle between Eva, Sachs and Walther. In most productions the widower Sachs is portrayed as a revered father figure. Here, the dashing Regency clothes and Finley’s youthfulness bring a touch of Mr Darcy to the role and he seems a credible suitor himself. In Act 3 his renunciation of any claim on Eva seethes with anger and bitterness. The dark sound of the cello underlines his mood.

Johannes Martin Kranzle is a consummate Beckmesser. The town clerk’s comeuppance after he steals Walther’s song in an attempt to win the contest is a riveting sight. Suddenly the humourless, self-important pedant is, like Shakespeare’s Malvolio, deflated and shamed.

For the final scene, McVicar throws in all the fun of the fair with stilt walkers, fire throwers, jugglers and the mighty chorus, too. Glyndebourne Orchestra’s sublime rendering of the score, under music director Vladimir Jurowski, makes it an evening that remains indelibly in the mind.

Fiona Maddocks, The Observer, 29 May 2011

An image by Dürer attracts the eye as the curtain rises on Glyndebourne’s new Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, which launched the 2011 festival to rapturous applause and only a few disgruntled faces last weekend. Christ Among the Doctors occupies the rear wall of the church where the townsfolk, hymning the midsummer feast of John the Baptist, provide a stirring opening chorus for this five-hour work.

In the painting, disputatious elders, one a grotesque caricature of toothless old age, shout doctrines and wag fingers at the young Jesus. It acts as a powerful reminder of the central argument in Wagner’s 1868 opera, hardly a rib-tickler but the closest he came to comedy. The young knight Walther is in no sense Christ, but he suffers the indignities of having his innovative prize song shouted down by the traditionalist Mastersingers, and the ridiculous and ridiculed Beckmesser in particular.

Dürer was a Nuremberg contemporary of the real Hans Sachs, the poet-cobbler who inspired Wagner’s most generous creation – here sung for the first time by Gerald Finley – whose troubled, hardwon sagacity shapes the drama. No visual detail in David McVicar’s production or Vicki Mortimer’s bold and faithful design, lit with sharp clarity by Paule Constable, is the result of chance.

This was Glyndebourne’s first performance of a work the festival’s founder, John Christie, had dreams of staging as long ago as 1928, which gave the first night a heightened sense of occasion. What could be more touching than to see the evident pleasure on the face of his son, Sir George Christie, who ran the festival for 40 years and whose own son Gus – now in charge – has at last been able to carry out his grandfather’s wishes.

Musically, it was judged faultlessly for the scale of the theatre by Vladimir Jurowski, who conjured playing of mercurial clarity – not the first words one would normally choose for this gargantuan score – from the London Philharmonic Orchestra, sustained with unfailing vigilance and concentration. Can someone award them bonus pay?

Yet while the staging looks good beneath an overarching late-gothic canopy, it is so specific in detail that we are challenged to comprehend McVicar’s entire purpose. The action has been updated to 1813, the year of Napoleon’s defeat at the Battle of Leipzig and the year of Wagner’s birth in that same city. German nationalism, too, was in its cradle, gathering force towards the 1848 revolutions in which the young composer would become entangled to the point of exile. A schema begins to emerge.

This may seem laborious. Opera is not history. But a compelling rationale is needed to explain why McVicar uprooted a work so steeped in the Renaissance and plonked it down in, of all things, the Biedermeier-Regency period, with Eva and Magdalene tripping along, in gauzy empire-line gowns, as if they were the Bennet sisters in search of Darcy (Pride and Prejudice was published in 1813).

The fixed set arch accommodates the various scenes, from church to street to, most effectively, Sachs’s book-lined study. As a result the stage is somewhat cramped by this great edifice, which may have had an acoustic purpose but made the crowd scenes muddled, though the fire-eaters and jugglers of the last act negotiated it skilfully. The chorus was outstanding. The same cannot be said for the grim Bavarian heel-and-toe folkloric dance of the young apprentices. No doubt their choreographed groin-thrusting was some sort of fertility rite for midsummer but I’m no anthropologist.

None of McVicar’s re-reading of history need worry anyone, and the overwhelming audience response suggests that, confused quibblers like me aside, it did not. Yet it made for a stiff and conventional interpretation which may yet unfurl as the stage movement grows more confident and the voices shed first-night nerves and tiredness. The tricky question of German art being sullied by other forces, the subject matter of Sachs’s climactic outburst near the end, was ducked.

Beckmesser, underplayed though well sung, by Johannes Martin Kränzle, won real sympathy for his pathetic tears at the end before he walks off stage, Malvolio-like, alone. Michaela Selinger’s Magdalene, as yet, has stronger characterisation than Anna Gabler’s Eva. Topi Lehtipuu’s David charmed while Marco Jentzsch’s Walther, dressed as a gold-braided soldier, looked the part but faltered at the challenging prize-song hurdle.

As for Sachs, Gerald Finley had seemed an unlikely choice. The rule book does not insist that the cobbler has to be a grizzled, lived-in, sad-eyed, salt-of-the-earth type, preferably on the large size and with a rich, rusted voice, but it helps – not least because the task of establishing character is partly done. Finley, dark, clean-cut, with matinee idol good looks and average build, cannot easily dominate a crowded stage in the same way. Best known as a lyric baritone of high musical intelligence, he has to find other ruses.

He will. Already he sings gloriously, and in the dark “Wahn!” moment, when Sachs reflects on the madness of life, began to express that terrible, soul-searching struggle which leads to wisdom. When he took his bow, Finley looked humbled by the roar of cheers which greeted him, as if to say “Thank you, but I’m only beginning…”. His Sachs may prove a fascinating reinterpretation of the role. If that sounds provisional, it is: a performer with Finley’s insight will make it a lifetime’s journey of discovery.

Rodney Milnes, Opera, July 2011

Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg Glyndebourne, May 25

To echo the age-old question about the Scottish Play, how many children had Hans Sachs? The libretto implies more than one, in rather vague terms. But Sachs momentarily unveiling a painting of mother and child at the start of the third act was one of many arresting moments in as penetrating and thought-provoking a Meistersinger as any I can remember.

How did it sound in this-for Wagner-small theatre? Wonderfully precise, but never clinical: you could hear everything from the pit. I always like to witness the final harp flourishes half way through the overture before their facet to the end, and there they were. Nice. Counterpoint is one of the main attractions of the score, and it was always clearly laid out. Some commentators have felt that Vladimir Jurowski kept the score on too tight a rein, others that he highlighted individual passages at the expense of overall flow, and others that he caught that ebb and flow perfectly. I incline towards the last view, and Wagnerians can argue the toss long into the nights ahead. In the face of long stretches of finely-nuanced, exceptionally beautiful playing from the London Philharmonic Orchestra, I am not going to complain. The chorus was fabulous. This was an evening of memorable music-making.

And it was matched on stage. Even Gerald Finley’s most fervent admirers felt he might be taking a risk singing Sachs when still so young, but his voice has filled out enormously over the last months, with much extra weight and colour at the bottom, still the same ease at the top, and evenness of emission throughout. His phrasing was always expressive, his colouring of the words full of insight. The characterization worked out with the director David McVicar was unconventional and – for me – grippingly original.

A young widower (in his 40s?), this Sachs was not afraid to show his dark side, his short temper, his tendency to bully and his bouts of depression. Some in the past have described the later acts as Sachs’s dark night of the soul, which I have always thought a slight exaggeration, but not here – viz. the painting. McVicar’s direction of the ten minute sequence leading to the Quintet was deeply painful, as it surely should be but seldom is. The loss of Eva, the prospect of an empty life stretching into the future: it was all there. In sum, a fascinating impersonation; we, or rather some of us, can relish the prospect of seeing Finley develop it over the next 20 years.

Finley had a worthy antagonist in the Beckmesser of Johannes Martin Kränzle. He is a remarkable actor, and it was hard to believe he was the same man who sings Valens in the Salzburg Theodora. Here, he was a youngish, rather handsome man, a credible suitor. He sang every note, however fatuous some are on the surface, as beautifully as possible, and proved a resourceful comedian-he and McVicar devised some new gags for his third-act mime. Most important, he never for a minute lost his dignity, and his downfall was very affecting-another life blighted in what seems more and more a ‘dark’ reading of Meistersinger.

To go back to the sound, was the orchestra inevitably over-loud in this theatre? It led to some of the cast consistently over-singing, surprisingly in the case of the experienced and canny Alastair Miles as Pogner. And it might lead to some re-casting at the first revival (oh, let it be soon). Ideally, Marco Jentzsch’s Walther, Anna Gabler’s Eva and Topi Lehtipuu’s David needed rather more robust tone, more honey in their sound. All three sang perfectly well, but a little wirily. Gabler’s diction was worryingly indistinct, odd from one of the few native Germans in the cast, and she was outshone by Michaela Selinger’s vivacious Magdalene.

The updating to the Biedermeier Germany of Wagner’s youth was no problem for me, though the literal-minded might note that Napoleon had dissolved the ‘Heil’ge Rom’sche Reich’ by then. Vicki Mortimer’s near-permanent set worked well, and was throughout most beautifully lit by Paule Constable. But I was worried by some of Mortimer’s costumes. Pogner, the richest man in Nuremberg-why so subfusc? Jentzsch was unflatteringly attired, his waistcoat ending well above his belt in a nod, perhaps, to today’s fashions, like Lehtipuu’s unappealingly baggy trousers. Jentzsch’s face-furniture and hairstyle made him look dowdy, especially next to Kränzle’s well-set-up Beckmesser. His glitzy operetta costume for the final scene could have a rethink – surely an aristocratic outsider confronting a bourgeois assembly would tactfully ‘dress down’.

Not all was dark in McVicar’s concept. There was colourful spectacle in the final scene, much detailed fun with the coffee-and-cake guzzling Masters in the first act. Colin Judson, McVicar’s unforgettable Mime in Strasbourg, was an eye-catching Vogelgesang, and if Henry Waddington went a bit over the top as Kothner, such experienced underplayers as Robert Poulton (Ortel), Alasdair Elliott (Zorn) and Adrian Thompson (Eisslinger) did far more with much less.

In advance publicity there was some heavy-breathing about Wagner’s politics and the final peroration, but it did not obtrude. Sachs sang ‘Verachtet mir die Meister nicht’ in a one-to-one conversation with Walther, with the rest of the company gradually becoming aware of it. Dashed clever. An anonymous 18^th century statue in Act 2 reminded us that this was also the Germany of Goethe and Schiller – Richard Jones suggested the same in Cardiff last year by different means. If you wanted to see Beckmesser as a caricature of Meyerbeer, good luck to you, but it never once occurred to me. Meistersinger, and this production, are bigger than that.

Melanie Eskenazi, Musicomh.com, 26.6.2011

George Orwell wrote that everyone knows that the perfect place to be is the English countryside on a summer’s day – no finer example of this can be found than Glyndebourne, but I’m sure that Orwell would have been far more approving of the venue for Sunday’s ‘live’ showing of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg in the IMAX cinema at the Science Museum. Anyone who thinks it rather weird that two such superficially disparate settings as these should come together would do well to heed the remarks made by the Musuem’s director, Ian Blatchford, in his the introductory speech at the pre-show reception: true to his background, with an MA in Renaissance Studies, it is his view that Science and Art are not in opposition but complement each other. This afternoon’s event was a wonderful example of that, bringing together, for me, the museum where all three of my children were more or less raised, and the opera house which is one of the centres of my musical life.

The IMAX cinema is vast, yet thanks to the steeply raked seating there is no sense of being surrounded; in fact, this was such an intimate experience that I have to recommend it even to die-hard ‘live only’ opera-goers, since I have seldom felt so in touch with what was happening onstage. This was the last night of the production, and you had the feeling that everyone was giving their all- it was such a buzz, for want of a better expression, to know that we were sharing this with people in cinemas all over the country.

David McVicar’s production has the look of an illustration from Vanity Fair (Thackeray’s, that is) and you half expect Eva and Magdalene to address each other as ‘Miss Sharp’ and ‘Miss Sedley,’ with Walther a dead ringer for poor, sappy George who is about to stop one at Waterloo. It looks wonderful, of course, with Vicki Mortimer’s characteristically detailed designs and Paule Constable’s ever-evocative lighting, and if we miss some of the entrancing stage action provided by earlier productions, this is compensated for by the lovingly etched characterization.

Gerald Finley is young to play Hans Sachs, and there were times when you found yourself thinking things like “If he was carrying her in his arms, he must have been six when he was doing so” but he presents such an absolutely credible figure, sensitive to every nuance of the music and subtlety of the action, that even those raised on Norman Bailey would surely approve. The ‘Flieder’ monologue and ‘Wahn, Wahn’ were both sung not as isolated set pieces but natural developments of the plot, and his interactions with Eva and Walther were deeply touching. I have seldom been so moved by the scene where Sachs and the knight collaborate on the song.

Marco Jetzsch seemed to grow into the part of Walther; he’s presented as a bit of a sap, one of those chinless wonder type knights who go around slicing up miscreants, but he sang with great commitment if little splendour or heroic tone. Anna Gabler’s Eva is a feisty creation, perhaps a little astringent but able to rise to the occasion, particularly in ‘Selig wie die Sonne.’ Both Michaela Selinger’s Magdalene and Topi Lehtipuu’s David are ideally cast, as credible as you could wish for in their scenes together.

The other Mastersingers are roundly characterized, most obviously Johannes Martin Kränzle’s foppish Malvolio of a Beckmesser – a notable Glyndebourne debut for this great lyric baritone. Henry Waddington was an adorably pompous Kothner, Colin Judson an hilariously ‘sensitive’ Vogelgesang, and it was wonderful to have Adrian Thompson’s ringing tone and exact characterization as Eisslinger. He’s still the best tenor Idamante I’ve ever heard.

The Chorus covered itself in glory as usual, with notably fine singing in the final act, and Vladimir Jurowski conducted a self-effacing, almost chamber-music reading of the score. There was plenty of grandeur when it was wanted, but no bombast – the surround sound in the cinema was warm and spacious. The video direction was superb, rivalling if not surpassing the live transmissions from the Met. The picture quality was stunning, though it did suffer from mild motion artefacts and video aliasing. I suspect this was down to the compression used for the transmission.

A great musical and cinematic event, and one which I hope will become a regular fixture.