For those who agonize over Sinopoli's interpretations of Verdi and Mahler, this reissue is a reminder of that early phase of his career when he was thought of primarily as a composer conducting modern music: the 'new' Boulez rather than the 'new' Abbado.
DG's well-filled Maderna disc benefits greatly from digital remastering, its percussive clangs and clatters spectacularly clear and realistic. I'm not disposed to revise my original opinion of the music. Aura is by far the best of the three pieces, its form cogently shaped, its ideas distinctive and memorable. Biogramma seizes the attention with passages of lyric melodic writing, only to lose it in featureless textural splinterings which now sound datedly avant-garde. Such effects are also all too evident, and protracted, in Quadrivium, which lasts for more than 35 minutes, the composer's abundant instrumental inventiveness (quite early on there's a beguiling duet for the vibraphone and double-bass) running into the sand of structural inconsequence: the last 11+ minutes of Quadrivium is a piece in itself.
A more varied sample of Maderna's work would serve his cause better, and that cause is by no means lost. Aura is a fine achievement, its final unaffected flute melody the perfect response to the sustained, aspiring intensity that has gone before.'