Abbado conducts a strong performance of the Tannhäuser overture, with the pilgrims pacing on their way in a particularly solemn tread followed by Venus sensuously wreathing her seductions, and an intense one of the Tristan Prelude and Liebestod. With Parsifal matters are more complicated. The sequence consists of the Act 1 Prelude (a live performance, like that of the Tristan music) and then an Act 3 collage which links passages of the score but with no voices apart from the contribution of the chorus. This is tremendous in the scene when the knights round on the suffering Amfortas and bully him into a new celebration of the Grail ritual, a horrible passage in the opera and done here with dreadful insistence. It is Abbado at his most powerful with very powerful music.

He is less at ease with the Prelude and the Good Friday music, where he emphasises firmness of line at the expense of the more meditative and mysterious; and the close of the entire work, in the Hall of the Grail, has a sense of pressure on it where the greatest Parsifal conductors, among them Goodall and Knappertsbusch, have the patience to allow the music to unfold with its own breadth and measure. The playing is magnificent, the recording rich and true; perhaps in concert excerpts these are qualities that can be permitted to take precedence over the subtleties of this most elusive of music dramas.