The British have taken Wagner’s Mastersingers to their hearts ever since Hans Richter’s premiering of the work in London and Sullivan’s affectionate homages in Yeomen of the Guard. Both these new/old performances, stemming from live broadcasts at key moments in the two major London opera companies’ histories, reflect the sense of community ensemble and Shakespearean mix of sacred and profane comedy which has become our particular national gift to Wagner’s comedy.

The more recent performance is something of a coronation for Bernard Haitink’s embattled but admired music directorship of the old Covent Garden. The performance, his happiest Wagner outing to date on disc, shows him to be a listening accompanist and precise balancer of orchestral textures. The discs too provide a souvenir of a memorable British double-act: John Tomlinson’s Sachs (fully engaged as philosophical poet or virile, passionate shoemaker) and Thomas Allen’s carefully drawn assumption of Beckmesser – pomposity and pathos founded on a vocal delivery which satisfies both demands for comedy and the stature appropriate to a senior member of the Mastersingers’ Guild.

They are ably supported. Gösta Winbergh is a thinking man’s knight who, like his bright and beautiful Evchen, Nancy Gustafson, is a great user of text as well as tone. Lippert is a fluent David, Gwynne Howell and Catherine Wyn-Rogers field a Pogner and Magdalene of uncommonly rich shadings – while the Masters’ list is a veritable who’s who of subtle, musical character actors. The recording has come up with a good sense of theatrical ping – apart from an oddly forward balance for the would-be eloping lovers in their Act 2 asides.

How happy one would be with this new set in a competition-less world but other recorded maestros like Toscanini, Knappertsbusch, Kempe and, most recently off-air, Thielemann delve more profoundly into the text and theatricality of this score than Haitink chooses to do. One such is Reginald Goodall, whose 1968 Sadler’s Wells performance(s) – legendary at least in British memory – has finally reached an official release on Chandos in Sir Peter Moores’s Opera in English series. Here is one legend which hits the light of a 2008 day as brightly as it shone 40 years ago. Goodall’s understanding of what every beat of this score means, and his successful communication of that to his personally trained cast, is a thing of wonder. Climaxes (end of Act 1, the riot, the quintet etc) are immense; timers may tell us it’s slow, but the pulse never flags.

Goodall’s Walther, Alberto Remedios, once said that when he played Caruso’s records at home he forgot to go out. The same compliment might be paid to this singer when he starts “Am stillen Herd”, or tells Sachs his morning dream in three parts, or delivers the prize song with a dream mixture of Italianate tone and line and German lyrical weight. OK, it’s in English, and a rather quaint English – but it has to be heard. So does Norman Bailey’s Sachs. He is a noble humanist, free (even in the gulling of Beckmesser) of petty concerns and stirred as opposed merely to being moody in yielding Evchen to Walther. His seamless delivery of the “Flieder” monologue, natural authority in the “Ein Kind war geboren” sequence and striking of the right blend of admonishment and advice in “Verachtet mir die Meister nicht” all represent work on a Friedrich Schorr/Hans Hotter level. And, together with Goodall, Margaret Curphey makes Eva’s predicaments and love always real rather than simply coy.

The plentiful laughter that can be heard is due to both the sharp theatrical pointing of Goodall’s conducting and the Eric Morecambe-like ability of Derek Hammond-Stroud’s Beckmesser to be genuinely funny just by appearing. Hammond-Stroud’s is a masterly comic performance at the other end of the pole to Allen’s – but equally valid.

I can understand non-Anglophone readers smiling whimsically but this Chandos release genuinely becomes one of the miracles of the current Wagner discography.