It is obviously high time that Claudio Abbado recorded Lulu. His account of the suite is ravishingly beautiful, with a warmly poetic ardour to Alwa’s music that so few real-life singers can give it (the “Hymne”, too, is genuinely hymn-like). The concluding scene has a dark, passionate vehemence and pity that are deeply moving. Any suspicion that he might be over-beautifying the music (and there are hints of him doing just that in the opening movement of the Lyric Suite) is erased by the hectic, almost garish drama of the second movement ostinato and the sober gravity that both he and Juliane Banse bring to the “Lied der Lulu”.
Banse is admirable in the Altenberg Lieder, too: expressive, unhampered by the range of the vocal line, and bringing to the last song a wide-spanning lyricism that seems almost a foretaste of Geschwitz’s death-song in Lulu. Aside from what I hear as a slightly blunted edge, even a slight loss of wit, in its opening movement, the Lyric Suite has the same admirable combination of richness and orchestral detail as the Altenberg Lieder – in the central movement Abbado demonstrates that clarity and a marking of misterioso are not incompatible – and the third movement, as it should be, is the Suite’s emotional nub: the Vienna Philharmonic’s strings respond with glowing passion.
I can say no better of the recording than it sounds as though Abbado did his own balancing. Strongly recommended.'