This legendary performance from the 1937 Salzburg Festival has circulated for years in inferior, not to say intolerable, sound. Using the original Austrian Radio Selenophone recording, part of the Toscanini Legacy Collection, as his source, Ward Marston has achieved a clearer, more amenable sound even though the wind and brass still have undue prominence and the strings are comparably distant.

That will always remain a serious disadvantage in assessing the true worth of Toscanini’s reading. Even so, enough can be heard to confirm contemporary opinion that this was a predominantly lyrical and easily flowing interpretation with a typically assertive sense of rhythm from the maestro. This Meistersinger has a natural pulse to it that never flags; what it doesn’t have are the deeper undertones and responses of other performances, especially those emanating from Bayreuth, with different conductors, in the 1950s or on the studio reading under Kempe.

Toscanini’s singers, mostly caught in faithful sound, are an admirable group, with one outstanding interpretation: that of the youthful Maria Reining as Eva. Lotte Lehmann had taken the part in the 1936 performances at Salzburg; here she is replaced by her natural successor at the Vienna State Opera. Reining’s smiling, beautiful tone fills Eva’s music with glorious sound, her diction is faultless, and she rises finely to the Act 3 climaxes of ‘O Sachs, mein Freund’, given tremendous impetus by Toscanini, and the Quintet, begun by her with just the right inner radiance. Her Act 2 encounter with Hans Hermann Nissen’s fatherly Sachs is another of the performance’s treasurable passages. Nissen’s voice is ideally suited to the part in body, range and warmth, as is well-known from the 1936 EMI Dresden set of Act 3, under Böhm, and his bluff delivery is always well-tuned and confident. One misses only that something extra in poetic insight provided by such as Hans Hotter and Theo Adam – or indeed Friedrich Schorr, whom Toscanini originally cast until a disagreement prevented him taking part. By their side Nissen seems one-dimensional.

The Dutch tenor Henk Noort is a pleasingly lyrical Walther though his tone sometimes tightens in alt. His voice and manner would be welcome today, even though he is not quite in the class of Sándor Kónya and Peter Anders, the best Walters on disc. Hermann Wiedemann is a stock, more-than-adequate Beckmesser, Herbert Alsen a correct Pogner, not in the class of Greindl, Moll or Ridderbusch in postwar performances. Kerstin Thorborg is a predictably attractive Magdalene; better still is her David, Richard Sallaba, then a Vienna stalwart, who has just the right keen, flexible tone and eager manner for the apprentice so that the recitation of the modes is, for once, not a bore. As far as one can tell, the chorus and orchestra are responsive to their distinguished conductor, in what was to be his last year, for political reasons, at Salzburg.

Lovers of the work will probably want to sample this set, but the highly recommendable 1951 Bayreuth version is available on Naxos for a song in, of course, far better sound and, the Walther perhaps excepted, a commendable cast.