Risonanze erranti a Massimo Cacciari, premiered in 1986, spins out of the compositional multiverse Luigi Nono created for Prometeo, his mid-1980s opera. For Prometeo, ‘opera’ actually feels like entirely the wrong word: spatial dispersion of voices, instruments and electronics locates any ‘action’ within the unfolding sounds – there’s no narrative ‘plot’ – an idea that Risonanze erranti advances more resourcefully, arguably, than any other post-Prometeo Nono.

The declamatory vocal writing at the beginning, its gestural peaks landscaped by clattering percussion, is briefly reminiscent of ‘classic’ period political Nono – Il canto sospeso and Intolleranza 1960 – but Nono’s ‘risonanza erranti’ (‘wandering resonances’) soon push the structure open. Very occasionally the electronics show their age: at 34'50" the gadgetry Nono deploys to harmonise Susanne Otto’s voice with itself sounds manufactured by today’s standards, but otherwise his tactic is to have electronics mess with our perception of time.

Electronically treated percussion is stacked against live percussion; the electronic percussion resonates with a different spectral shape to the real-time playing – simultaneous layers of time tick together, and time is everything here. Spiritually, this music that forever speaks of the future has, Nono divulges, roots in fragmented quotes from Ockeghem, Machaut, Josquin Desprez. Susanne Otto’s singing carries the notion that there’s an important structural distinction to be made between overarching text – ‘that’s what happened then’ – and the diced-up fragments of text which move the piece towards a questioning finish more open-ended than its beginning: fleeting moments of ‘now’.

This is Risonanze erranti’s long overdue debut on CD; Post-prae-ludium per Donau, for tuba and live electronics, has been recorded before but never with such an intimate, stark sound environment.