The 2002 production of Berg's Lulu by Richard Jones is generally agreed to be one of the best things to come from troubled English National Opera in recent years. Chandos has done everyone a favour by transferring its 2005 revival lock, stock and smoking revolver from the opera house to the studio.
This is important for several reasons. Lulu can seem forbidding to the uninitiated. Its amoral characters, its sordid plot, its enigmatic antiheroine, its complex (and masterful) formal design: all these aspects repel some as much as they attract others. Yet cabaret burlesque is as integral to the opera's make-up as high operatic tragedy. Paul Daniel and the Chandos engineers don't let us forget it. Piano, saxophone and vibraphone get the prominence they deserve.
The farcical comings and goings in Parisian salon and London garret alike spring to life without the inevitable noises-off and dropouts of an in-house recording.
Richard Stokes has rendered Wedekind's demotic text aptly and brilliantly enough for anyone who will not wrinkle their noses at (say) the Acrobat's refrain of 'Bugger, bugger, bugger it!' And the ENO orchestra swing where the Paris Opéra for Boulez are stiff. It should come as no surprise that Böhm and the Viennese know their way around a quickstep and a tango; likewise Daniel and his players really get under the skin of Berg's 'English Waltz' in Act 3.
So consistent an overall vision is perhaps bound to reduce the starring role of Lulu herself.
In Jones's production, Lisa Saffer projected her onstage as a fantasy-u-like for her many admirers. Without the sublime confidence of an Anja Silja, the vulnerability of a Constance Haumann or the hauteur of a Teresa Stratas, she brings unruffled poise and a shapely, silken tone that would not be out of place in Wolf. Nor is it here; as Dr Schön observes, after Lulu has shot him and poured herself a glass of champagne, 'You never change'. Robert Hayward's Schön is gruff, like his Wotan: a bully reduced to bluster. It is Countess Geschwitz who must convey whatever redemptive transformation Berg (not Wedekind) has to offer, and Susan Parry is equal to the task, moving from mannish suavity to an intensely moving Liebestod. John Graham- Hall is no more of a cipher than most Alwas – a Wunderlich or a Bostridge may be too much to hope for.
The many smaller parts are well taken and distinctly enunciated but the most definitive portrayal here is Gwynne Howell's Schigolch, weary and pervy and always with the emphasis on the gesang, not the sprech.
Original-language recordings will hardly go out of fashion, nor ones with more Mahlerian breadth and depth of feeling; for both, Christine Schäfer needs to be seen in Graham Vick's production on DVD (see below). But for Lulu in the raw, a Rosenkavalier with no underwear, this is one to go for.

The 2002 production of Berg's Lulu by Richard Jones is generally agreed to be one of the best things to come from troubled English National Opera in recent years. Chandos has done everyone a favour by transferring its 2005 revival lock, stock and smoking revolver from the opera house to the studio... Lisa Saffer... brings unruffled poise and a shapely, silken tone that would not be out of place in Wolf. Robert Hayward's Schön is gruff, like his Wotan: a bully reduced to bluster. It is Countess Geschwitz who must convey whatever redemptive transformation Berg... has to offer, and Susan Parry is equal to the task, moving from mannish suavity to an intensely moving Liebestod.