Nuremberg with Cranach and Acrobats: Mark Berry reports on a revival of Harry Kupfer’s Berlin ‘Meistersinger’

This was a frustrating Meistersinger: in many ways good, but it could easily have been better. The Prelude to Act I did not augur well, combining a somewhat uninflected smoothness of line with a surprisingly hard-driven quality. The combination put me in mind of Karajan on an off-day. Like Karajan even at his most unappealing – and I speak as an admirer in general – Daniel Barenboim would not have been capable of allowing the performance to fall below a certain level. There was, for instance, no doubt that he had command of the work’s structure.