condition (record/cover): NM / EX- | A superb and almost completely unknown survey of Italian string quartet composition from the postwar generation, performed by the Quartetto della Società Cameristica Italiana - one of the most important and least documented ensembles in the history of Italian new music. The quartet, featuring Massimo Coen and Enzo Porta alternating at first violin, Umberto Oliveti at second violin, Emilio Poggioni on viola and Italo Gomez on cello, had already recorded a landmark disc for Wergo with works by Schnebel, Wolff, Donatoni and Berio. This second collection, recorded for the Italia label in 1978, casts a wider net across the Italian compositional landscape - seven works by seven composers, each offering a distinct response to the question of what the string quartet could become after the serial revolution.

Boris Porena's Musica per quartetto opens the set - Porena, the Roman composer and theorist, a pupil of Petrassi who developed a rigorously personal language outside the dominant schools. Bruno Canino, universally known as one of the great pianists of postwar Italy - partner to Cathy Berberian, Severino Gazzelloni, Salvatore Accardo - is heard here in his far less familiar role as composer. Labirinto n. 3 is a substantial work that reveals a compositional intelligence as acute as the pianistic one, its title suggesting the spatial and structural complexity that runs through it. Azio Corghi's Jocs florals (Floral Games) closes the first side - the title borrowed from the medieval Catalan poetry competitions, the music threading lyrical impulses through a modernist framework.

The second side opens with Aldo Clementi's Reticolo 4 - the fourth in his series of "networks" for various ensembles, music of crystalline intricacy in which polyphonic lines overlap and interlock with an almost obsessive precision. Clementi's is perhaps the most radical aesthetic on the disc: music stripped of dramatic gesture, devoted entirely to the beauty of its own structural processes. Franco Donatoni's Quartetto IV: Zrcadlo follows - the subtitle means "mirror" in Czech, and the work exists in two versions, Donatoni's characteristic play with the idea of musical material as something reflected, inverted, transformed. This is the same quartet the ensemble had already recorded for Wergo, here presumably in a different realization. Umberto Rotondi's Quartetto is the least known work on the disc, by a composer whose output has been almost entirely neglected by discography. Marcello Panni's D'ailleurs closes the set - Panni, better known as a conductor (he would go on to premiere operas by Bussotti and direct at major European houses), here contributes a work whose French title ("from elsewhere") suggests the displaced, allusive quality of the music.

LP with liner notes by Mario Baroni. Released on Italia, ITL 70024, 1978.