The Lulu suite accounts for nearly half of this well-filled CD, and it is very good indeed. Much of it is voluptuously beautiful music and Levine and his players sound as though they are enjoying both it and the spacious acoustic of the Manhattan Center after spending so many evenings in the comparatively confined orchestral pit of the Met. Fleming sings Lulu’s song thoughtfully and is moving in Geschwitz’s poignant farewell. (She is less satisfactory as Marie, treating her Sprechstimme like a switchback and adopting the manners of a tragedy queen for the sad little story she tells her child.) The ostinato second movement of the Lulu suite is vividly done, and there is a tangible chill at the beginning of the final scene.
However, I found the spaciousness of the recording something of a problem in the other music here. In Wozzeck one is aware of parts of the orchestra being really quite far away, while in Op. 6 the perspectives are sometimes odd. Most of the lines that Berg asks to be given prominence are in clear relief, and in any case I do not imagine that he intended every detail to be audible. But when four horns (admittedly playing stopped notes, piano) are perceptible only as a distant buzzing (at the beginning of the pesante final section of the third piece) something is wrong. In Op. 6 and to a lesser extent in the Wozzeck pieces the violins seem oddly distant in tuttis. But when the beginning of the climax of the second piece in Op. 6 is played very loudly indeed, despite the fact that most of the instruments are marked mf at most, Levine must take the blame.
These are sumptuous readings on the whole, with exquisite quiet playing, most beautiful string sound and massive bass-rich textures. But they are not especially urgent – tempos throughout are on the slow side – and the richness combines with the expansive landscape of the recorded perspective to drive out some of the pain and the terror which are surely an important part of Op. 6 as well as of Wozzeck. The March in Op. 6 should sound richly Mahlerian, of course, as it does here, but it should also be frightening, macabre, not luxurious.'