‘Holy Art’ in English: Mark Berry is pleased with the ‘Mastersingers’ production and sometimes even moved by the performance

Review of The Mastersingers of Nuremberg, directed Jones, conducted Gardner, English National Opera, London, 2015.

July 2015, Volume 9, Number 2, 68–71

Although the English National Opera has been decidedly sparing with its Wagner for quite some time now, its recent track record, leaving aside a disastrous Ring, has perhaps been preferable to that at Covent Garden. Above all, I think of Nikolaus Lehnhoff’s production of Parsifal, alas revived but once, with estimable conducting from ENO’s soon-to-be Music Director, Mark Wigglesworth, and, bar an unfortunate Kundry, a fine cast. There was telling contrast with the Royal Opera’s recent Parsifal: a production that appeared to offer a bizarre tribute to an ersatz Jimmy Savile, a music director quite out of his depth, and a tenor whose replacement with a pneumatic drill would have been more or less universally welcomed. Here, a Meistersinger production originally seen in Cardiff from the Welsh National Opera again proved preferable to Covent Garden’s most recent offering (an especially sad state of affairs at the sometime house of Bernard Haitink). If we quietly leave to one side the most extravagant critical claims recently to be heard – surely more a consequence of sympathy with and support for ENO in the face of financial and managerial difficulties than of properly critical reception – this proved something to be cherished, something of which ENO could justly be proud: a good, and in many respects a very good, company performance.