A “portrait” of Luigi Dallapiccola, albeit a portrait of a decade when he moved from an idiom that fused Stravinsky and Berg towards an even more personal take on serial thinking. There is nothing dutiful about his use of Paganini caprices in Sonata canonica (1943), its contrapuntal intricacy and Lisztian vitality well conveyed by David Wilde. Although a more challenging listen, Quaderno musicale di Annalibera (1952) is made pleasurable by the ingenuity with which Dallapiccola integrates technical studies and poetic evocations in a Busonian marriage of discipline and imagination of which Wilde (despite a less than perfect piano action) is fully aware. The link between these works is made by episodes arranged from the ballet Marsia (1949) in a virtual “sonata” of real expressive power, as well as by the finely controlled rhetoric of the Machado Lyrics (1948) and the Bachian linear intensity of Ciaconna, intermezzo e adagio (1945). With the Webernian interplay of voice and clarinets in Goethe Lieder (1953), Dallapiccola has all but arrived at the language of his last two decades.

Almost all these works are available elsewhere. Mariaclara Monetti’s disc of piano music is hardly less responsive than Wilde, with Arturo Bonucci’s account of the Ciaconna and Luisa Castellani’s of the Machado Lyrics more attuned to the music than those by Robert Irvine and Nicola Stonehouse, though Susan Hamilton is eloquence itself in the Goethe Lieder. Sound is well balanced if a shade hard in tone, and David Kimball’s note is a model of lucidity. As an introduction to an under-appreciated composer, this release has much to recommend it.