Royal Philharmonic concerts in London have repeatedly shown that Daniele Gatti loves and understands this music; with the deluxe casting of the Concertgebouw and equally sleek engineering to hand, quality overrides considerations of quantity (though 54 minutes for a CD will always rankle with some). Perhaps conductors as well as listeners can be distracted by the high-gloss surfaces of Berg’s orchestration, especially in the Lulu Suite, but Gatti always draws the ear inwards, past smoochy saxophone and celesta, deep inside those contrapuntal caverns of ecstasy where Berg is even more in his element than Mahler or Strauss. On the way, some of the alienation of Lulu from its Viennese origins gets lost, preserved in slower, more probing and less sonically ingratiating accounts by Scherchen and Gielen, and if the waltz rhythm of the Variations feels too closely waltz-like for its disrupted context, the tremulous soprano of Anat Efraty is a long way from pressing any buttons of dissolute seduction, and some distance from the notes on the page.

Relentless momentum is more evidently desirable in the successive nightmares of the Three Orchestral Pieces, however, and Gatti maintains a strong pulse while allowing passages such as the thick wind chords at the end of Reigen to open up like some awful gaping maw. His timings for each piece are very close to those of Boulez with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, but the intervening 40 years have seen Op 6 advance from rarity to repertoire with concomitant gains in idiomatic familiarity and no loss in its power to seize, hold and shock the ear.