These days it’s not unknown for productions of Berg’s Lulu to omit the first scene of Act 3, as finalised by Friedrich Cerha. This might well have been tightened up by the composer had he lived to complete the score himself. Yet Vera Nemirova’s Salzburg Festival production not only retains the scene but gives it unusual exuberance by placing the singers within the audience rather than on the stage for a good part of it. (Unless my eyes deceive me, one of the audience members quite prominently on view is the leading German composer Wolfgang Rihm.)

Act 3 is by some way the most effectively filmed and persuasively performed. In general the rather monolithic stage settings and normal stage lighting don’t lend themselves especially well to film presentation and even as seasoned a director as Brian Large can’t avoid some fairly ungainly close-ups, including several too many of Patricia Petibon’s wildly staring eyes. Balancing the work’s divergent tendencies towards low farce and high pathos is never easy – Wozzeck is a far more homogeneous conception – and the boldness shown in Act 3 scene 1 does rather point up the timidity elsewhere, especially in Act 1.

Musically there is plenty to admire: if the relatively low-key approach in the opera’s first half is the deliberate policy of conductor Marc Albrecht, this certainly helps him to pile on the intensity in the later stages. Thomas Johannes Meyer and Pavol Breslik provide the most potent characterisations in Act 1, so it takes longer for the main trio – Patricia Petibon, Michael Volle and Thomas Piffka – to command the stage both dramatically and musically.

Ultimately, it is Volle as Dr Schön and Jack the Ripper who impresses most in comparison with his recorded predecessors in these roles. Petibon’s background in early music may be thought to give her an unusual degree of vulnerability when tackling such a different vocal style; there is less of Kundry or Salome in the background here than with most other Lulus on disc. After a cautious start, her performance gains conviction as it proceeds, helped by effective interaction with Tanja Ariane Baumgartner’s eloquently haggard Geschwitz. In the end, I was won over, though some sense of unevenness remains: this is one of those recordings that takes time to reach the dark, disturbed heart of Berg’s most ambivalently poised and perturbing work.