File Swiss composer Klaus Huber’s work for voices, chorus, orchestra and tape under Nono’s Il canto sospeso and Zimmermann’s Requiem für einen jungen Dichter as one of those modernist, politically motivated oratorios that have been entirely the domain of post-war central European composers. Erniedrigt-Geknechtet-Verlassen-Verachtet (1975-83) raises characteristic concerns: it’s a rage against the machine of political censure, constructed around the writings of Nicaraguan priest and politician Ernesto Cardenal and relayed through angsty, serially derived music that pulls in collage and quotation.

Is Huber’s trade-off between text and music as powerfully affecting as Nono’s and Zimmermann’s? Probably not: he leans heavily towards theatrics when the narrative going gets tough, slipping from the metaphysical towards some pretty crude artifice. The opening passage is a case in point, as voices are symbolically suffocated through layers of polyrhythmic instrumental writing (so polyrhythmic three co-conductors are required) while, further on, recordings of marching jackboots feel overly propagandist.

But Huber’s sincerity ultimately wins through. In Part 3, explosive texts by one-time Black Panther activist George Jackson are collaged against blues and work songs. Hearing Jackson appeal to his “brothers and sisters” in post-Schoenbergian Sprechstimme is incongruous but the conceit is also curiously moving. In the finale, Huber “fakes” a chorale: he reassembles lines from Bach’s cantata Christ lag in Todesbanden, overlaying them to form a thick purée, and finally he punctures holes in the texture that allow triads and fragments of melody to blossom before the music sinks back towards its silent starting-point.

This is a recording of the work’s 1983 premiere. Matthias Bamert shepherds his forces expertly and the recording captures the wide dynamic range clearly.