Electronic music was initially born of idealism and a spirit of adventure. It's easy to forget those pioneering days when confronted by the academic and dispassionate sounds that too often pass for “electroacoustic” music these days. Luigi Nono's electronic music profoundly transcends its own identity as “electronic music”, and its core technical and political concerns are indistinguishable from the orchestral and choral music he was creating at the same time. In Nono's hands, electronics became a powerful tool through which to refract contemporary concerns.

This two-CD set collects all the trailblazing electronic music Nono assembled between 1960 and 1974, using original tapes stored by Italian Radio in Milan. Returning to these works after many years I'm struck by the clarity of Nono's intentions, but also by their psychological depth and the brilliance of their execution. Nono's electronic masterpiece is often considered to be Ricorda cosa ti hanno fatto in Auschwitz (1966), and here it's heard in the context of the stage work that spawned it, Musiche di scena per Ermittlung. Holocaust-based pieces are high-risk but Nono's treatment of vocal sources always puts the humanity of his subject ahead of his own desire merely to solve compositional problems. Sometimes the voices feel suffocated by electronic overexposure; later their angry swells yell defiance. Nono's meta-collage presents a symbolically bewildering information overload.

Paradoxically, when Nono employs long stretches of political text in Contrappunto dialettico alla mente (1967-68) his message loses the expressive precision of earlier; but Für Paul Dessau (1974) once again finds penetrating levels of ambiguity.