condition (record/cover): NM / NM | Four works spanning three decades of Luigi Dallapiccola's output, performed by musicians from his closest circle. Sandro Materassi - the violinist who gave the world premiere of the Tartiniana Seconda alongside the composer at the piano in Vienna in 1956 - plays both violin works here. Pietro Scarpini, the great Florentine pianist who premiered the Tre episodi dal balletto Marsia, is at the keyboard. Amedeo Baldovino takes the solo cello work. Magda László - the Hungarian soprano who created roles for Dallapiccola across decades, including the premiere of the Tre pœmi under Scherchen in 1950 and An Mathilde under Rosbaud at Donaueschingen in 1955 - sings the Parole di San Paolo, with instrumental ensemble directed by Zoltán Peskó. Recorded 1974, published by Edizioni Suvini Zerboni.

The Tartiniana Seconda (1955-56) for violin and piano is among Dallapiccola's most immediately captivating works - twelve-tone technique applied to themes drawn from Tartini, producing a result comparable to Stravinsky's Suite Italienne in its luminous interplay of eighteenth-century melody and modern harmonic thinking. The Due Studi (1946-47) for violin and piano originated as sketches for a never-completed documentary film about Piero della Francesca - salvaged fragments of a lost project, reshaped into concert pieces. The Ciaccona, Intermezzo e Adagio (1945) for solo cello belongs to the wartime years when Dallapiccola, forced into hiding from the Fascist regime, was completing Il Prigioniero.

The disc culminates in Parole di San Paolo (1964), one of Dallapiccola's supreme late works: a setting of Saint Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians for mezzo-soprano and eleven instruments (flute, alto flute, two clarinets, bass clarinet, celesta/piano, vibraphone/xylorimba, harp, viola, cello). Premiered at the Library of Congress in Washington on 30 October 1964, conducted by the composer himself. The scoring is characteristic of late Dallapiccola - sustained woodwind and string tones, luminous percussion textures, that "impressionistic sensuality" that makes his dodecaphony sound unlike anyone else's. The diminished fifth functions throughout as a symbol of the sacred, while the extreme refinement of the instrumental writing achieves what Italian critics described as a "transcendental reduction" of music, comparable to late Stravinsky but arriving at nearly opposite results. Dallapiccola (1904 Pisino d'Istria - 1975 Florence), the first Italian serialist, whose lifelong concern with political imprisonment originated in his family's internment by Austria during the First World War. Published Suvini Zerboni, Milan.