Retired Festival chief Wolfgang Wagner’s third Bayreuth production of his grandfather’s tricky comedy finally gains a commercial release nearly a decade after it was filmed. In that time it has been well circulated on European arts channels where it made for comfortable night- or fireside-viewing. The staging is the undoubtedly loving work of a cultured man who knows the piece inside out and wishes to represent it faithfully but whose other duties have prevented his developing any especially distinctive style of his own. Much of Wolfgang’s work resembles a less provocative version of earlier ideas by his brother Wieland.

Onstage then, this is the operatic equivalent of what publishers of detective fiction call a “cosy”. Everyone does what you expect them to do in the “right” historical period, while there’s a lot of well honed detail and few (if any) surprises – except, perhaps for 1999, in the constantly beautiful and lyrical singing of Andreas Schmidt’s Beckmesser who is left in the position of being neither villain nor victim nor (as in Bayreuth’s current production) hero. Stronger direction might have helped Robert Holl achieve a better-rounded physical portrayal of Sachs (he remains, aside from his “Hat man mit dem Schuhwerk” outburst, an amiable, middle-aged buffer whose ending can be plainly seen in his first appearance) and encouraged Peter Seiffert to risk more in his delineation of Walther’s passions. The wonderful women, Mesdames Magee and Svendén, however, get there on their own and their dignity and detail are worth watching.

Apart from them, and the sexy aeroplane choreography of the “girls from Fürth” (who Endrik Wottrich’s David finds understandably alluring), the main attractions of the release lie in Daniel Barenboim’s beautifully limned and paced account of the score. He is continually alert to the music’s darker side – of which Wagner spoke (or warned) so eloquently in his correspondence with his patron Ludwig – and produces a decidedly Tristan-ised Meistersinger. Sadly, little of these colours are echoed in the staging.

At the moment the most satisfying Meistersinger for home viewing is Götz Friedrich’s Deutsche Oper production well conducted by Frühbeck de Burgos with outstandingly well presented male leads in Wolfgang Brendel and Gösta Winbergh (ArtHaus, 4/01). But beware the ides of November when the DVD appearance of Katharina Wagner’s trenchantly iconoclastic Bayreuth staging should truly set the cat among the pigeons.