Re: have your rankings of favorite Meistersingers changed?

> Candidly, one of the great virtues of the first Karajan set, IMO, was
> its sense of humor and its crucial grasp of the conversational in this
> work.  Precisely those two qualities appear to have paled to an extent
> in Karajan's second outing, IMO.  This factor, along with one of the
> least satisfying interpreters of Hans Sachs on disc -- IMHO --
> effectively relegates this to......well, not entirely an Also-Ran (Kollo
> gives his finest performance on disc here, and I have always been a
> great admirer of Helen Donath)........the status of a decent and
> professional enough reading with its share of peaks but not with the
> capacity to maintain full interest throughout.
> 
> Many greatly admire this set, true.  And whatever is good here is very
> good.  (Gorgeous orchestral colors also count for something, no
> question.)  But there is too much here that is, at the same time,
> journeyman class -- and when one such instance of that is the leading
> character (Sachs, in my estimation), the combination of that with the
> (partial) loss of the conversational simply bulks too large to pass
> muster for me.  Thus, this has always struck me as a decent set, but not
> a leading one.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Geoffrey Riggs
> www.operacast.com

Many thanks for the terrific synoptic review of your favourite ten
recordings.

I can't help but notice that recordings by living conductors - we're
down to Sawallisch and Barenboim - are absent. One might even conclude
(however falsely) that Meistersinger performances get better in
relation to their proximity to WW2.

Fault of the times, of the conductors or of the recording companies?
I've heard Haitink lead a wonderful performance of Meistersinger at
Covent Garden, but the cast as a whole wasn't really worth preserving.

Who would you want to record it this year? This decade? Just curious
...

Richard