Last year’s new Salzburg Meistersinger plays in the uniform historical setting of the pre-1848 German Biedermeier era. Herheim, his designers and evidently active dramaturg Alexander Meier-Dörzenbach trail much of that period’s history – eg the publication of Grimm’s Fairy Tales and Des Knaben Wunderhorn, and the first German steam train service from Fürth to Nuremberg – on a generously mobile unit set in which all scenes take place on blow-up sections of Hans Sachs’s house. The cobbler/poet himself introduces – and may even be actually composing and painting – every scene of the action. He looks like Wagner in middle age, as do all the Masters on the Festwiese and Beckmesser. The end of the show even flirts with the hitherto under-developed idea that the Marker and Sachs are like The Ring’s Alberich and Wotan, black and white sides of the same coin. Outside these two, the remaining principals are often very pantomime figures indeed who, apart from Peter Sonn’s straight and serious David, remind one in Herheim’s busy Personenregie of the jolly physicality of Danny Kaye’s old Hans Christian Andersen film.

The end result understates the opera both dramatically and musically. Michael Volle gives his all as Sachs before he runs short of voice on the Festwiese, although his uncharismatic stage years and gait here remind one of ‘the doltish jack-pudding’ as whom Heinrich Heine parodied the historical figure. Markus Werba’s Beckmesser is vocally and dramatically a noble, unhackneyed pedant. Both these leads as presented here are hard to describe character-wise except as what they’re not. Volle’s Sachs is no Romantic existentialist lovelorn poet, Werba’s Beckmesser no persecuted Jewish caricature. And the show’s two women are light and frothily brain-dead to a point that diminishes their characters.

Gatti seeks to match Herheim’s production with initially chamber-like sonorities then a gradual upping of both dynamics and colour for street brawl and singing contest. But he ends up with a much less coherent (and not so well-played) image of the opera than Toscanini and Thielemann, both triumphant with the VPO in this piece. Regrettably, that’s a good match for the production as it stands caught here – a great deal of work done but (as yet) to no very clear purpose.