Despite an undeserved reptutation as a bland and bombastic symphony, the Fifth was a particular favorite of the Milanese conductor, who performed and recorded the "contrapuntal masterwork" (as Bruckner himself called it) on multiple occasions. In 2011, Abbado's genius and the virtuosic Lucerne Festival Orchestra transformed the ugly duckling symphony into a modern and visionary work: as The Guardian put it, the performance was "a vision of infinity, a collapsing of time and space into a single point of brilliance and intensity."