The shortfall of vocal presence is what kept this performance at the minimal level of interest. Had the voices been larger, we could perhaps have borne with the interruptions of line, the retreat to parlando or to a sustained but “straight” tone, of the sort we so often hear in Germanic singing. Had a continuity of vibrated tone been present, we would have been less often let down by the insufficiency of volume. A plea to these and many other contemporary singers: whether your voice is large or small, whether or not it is of ideal, supported sonority up and down its range, do your best to blacken all the little ovals. If you do not blacken the ovals, your vote will not be counted! Fill in the little notes, vibrate the sustained ones, then string them all together! Then we can follow you, and the music.

When Michael Volle, the Sachs, sang out in the Act 2 cobbling song, we heard a voice of modest size and lightish timbre for this role, but audible and firm. At the long evening’s end, he put an honest effort into “Verachtet mir die Meister nicht.” Elsewhere (which means, crucially, the Fliedermonolog and scene with Eva in Act 2, and the whole of the Act 3 workshop scene), this role, at the opera’s heart, was consistently undersung, with frequent resort to a clipped Sprechstimme. Vogt threaded his way gingerly through Walther’s music. Neither man commanded the stage by force of personality. In Act 1, Johannes Martin Kränzle (joining  Appleby as the only holdovers among principals from the last revival) did hold the stage with his Beckmesser, a man apparently secure of his standing a cut above the other Masters, and confident of the outcome in the matter at hand. He did not succeed, though, in showing us the gradual unraveling of that person, or in preserving traces of him in the welter of duncelike flailings prescribed for him later on, and in Act 2 allowed his slender but listenable baritone to slide into unmusical cawings. And though he has a handsomer, more musically adaptable voice than any of the aforementioned, Zeppenfeld did not make much of Pogner. It was not only that his timbre is, again, light for the part, but that he seemed satisfied to merely recite the Address  without urgency, sense of import, or even musical shaping—neither a vocal expansion nor musical broadening at, for instance, “und beide preist man weit und lang,/die Gabe wie die Weise,” or “drum hört, Meister, die Gab,/die als Preis bestimmt ich hab:”, etc., to say nothing of the build to the oration’s climax. Everything (including his daughter’s married happiness, the reputation of his cherished home city, etc.) evidently of an equal, moderate significance. In important secondary roles, Alexander Tsymbalyuk as the Night Watchman alternated attractive bass-baritone notes with gruff, straight ones (possibly he was trying to “characterize), and as Kothner, we had the same puzzling casting choice of a high character baritone as at Salzburg—but a different one, Martin Gantner, who made a throaty hash of the flourishes that top off the recitation of the rules. Gantner and Mahnke, two singers lacking the basic vocal qualifications for their important supporting roles, were both imports. That’s incomprehensible—the warehouse isn’t that empty.