A richly cast revival of Wagner’s Meistersinger at the Met

The latest revival of Otto Schenk’s 30-year-old production of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg at the Metropolitan Opera on Tuesday night drew warm applause as the curtain rose. But it also raised questions about Schenk’s conservatism and that of the Met’s audience.

It was indeed refreshing to see a plausibly realistic recreation of 16th-century Nuremberg. Not that the Wagner of Schenk and his longtime designer Günther Schneider-Siemssen looks like what Wagner himself saw 150 years ago. But Schenk’s Wagner is part of performance tradition, and hence “authentic” in a way similar to that to which the early music movement once aspired.

But maybe the audience that regrets seeing this kind of production fade away is fading, too. The huge Met theatre looked only half full, though some of that attrition may be due to an unwillingness to sit wearing masks for six hours.

Still, this revival was richly cast and bolstered by some clever stage direction, some no doubt due to Schenk, some to the revival stage director Paula Suozzi and some to the singers, many of them Meistersinger veterans who brought bits of business with them. The crowd scenes were less successful, particularly in the cramped setting of the climactic outdoor second scene of the third act.

Lise Davidsen was the newsiest cast member. She has a larger soprano than some who sing Eva, but hers is bright and appealing. As an actor she seemed livelier than previously, charming and girlish. She was paired with Klaus Florian Vogt as Walther, whose much-remarked-upon voice has made him popular in central Europe but to some of us it still sounds like an edgy if powerful tenorino. He was not helped by a sparkly operetta costume in the third act.

Michael Volle made a solid Sachs, not very poetic but surely sung and strong to end — he has sometimes run out of steam in Wagner operas. There was a good clutch of subsidiary master singers, with Claudia Mahnke a serviceable Magdalene and Alexander Tsymbalyuk a sonorous Nightwatchman.

Aside from Davidsen, the best performances came from Georg Zeppenfeld and his imposing bass as Pogner, Paul Appleby as a bright David, and best of all, Johannes Martin Kränzle as Beckmesser, the cleverest, most amusing account of that part I can recall.

Despite his partly American upbringing, the conductor Antonio Pappano is by now firmly based in London, with run-outs to Rome. This Meistersinger was his first Met appearance in 24 years, but to be fair to the Met, he’s been busy abroad. He is much admired there, but to this taste he was disappointing. Tempi and phrasing were convincing enough but some of the playing sounded ragged and some of the balances odd — aggressively loud timpani, for instance. It made one miss James Levine in his heyday.

★★★☆☆

To November 14, metopera.org