Anyone reading the booklet note here would be forgiven for wondering why it has taken 35 years for Ulisse to become widely available. Already in his lifetime, however, Luigi Dallapiccola had become a figure respected yet distant from the nerve centre of new music: a link between the generation of Malipiero and Pizzetti, and that of Berio and Nono – responding to the spiritual mysticism of the one and the cultural radicalism of the other, while remaining aloof from both. So, a pivotal figure between two epochs – with Ulisse the summation of his creativity. The reception of its Berlin première in 1968 was decidedly equivocal, confirming that composers from time of transition are allotted a reactionary role, as the lukewarm reception meted out to Busoni’s Doktor Faust all too clearly demonstrates.The Busoni analogy is relevant because Ulisse, like Doktor Faust, is the stage-work its composer was destined to write, and around which smaller-scale pieces revolve in satellite fashion. Unlike Busoni, Dallapiccola draws not just on pieces from the previous decade, but on those stretching back to the 1930s. The operas Volo di notte and Il prigioniero are alluded to, as well as several vocal and choral works – from all of which evolved his mature idiom, a serialism of harmonic refinement and thematic richness. Textually, the opera is equally inclusive – Homer being supplemented with Antonio Machado and Thomas Mann, with the distinction between ‘everyman’ and ‘modern man’ pointedly overcome.By the same token, Ulisse is less about character development than the stemming of its subsidiary figures out from the main protagonist. Thus the encounters that Ulysses relates to Alcinoo (Alcinous) in Act 1 – with the Lotus-Eaters, Circe, then his mother and Tiresia (Tiresias) in the underworld – are presented as memories whose reality is such only in his own mind. This emotional distancing operates in reverse for the reunion in Act Two with Penelope – who, as with the princess Nausicaa, Ulysses can reach in person but not in spirit. Hence the abandoned Calypso in the Prologue – surveying the expanse of ocean and remembering Ulysses’ words about gazing onward: words he himself will recall when, alone on the sea in the Epilogue, he perceives union with a ‘creator’ to be the true goal of his searching.Dallapiccola enthusiasts may have come across the première of Ulisse (conducted by Lorin Maazel) when it appeared fleetingly on Nuovo Era a decade ago. This performance, made by Radio France barely three months after the composer’s death, has Claudio Desderi as an assertive but emotionally fraught Ulysses, together with Gwynn Cornell’s licentious Circe, Denise Boitard’s plaintive Nausicaa, and Colette Herzog’s affecting Calypso. The chorus is as responsive to the intricate speech-song of the powerful scene in Hades – in which Stan Unruh is a baleful Tiresias – as is the orchestra, superbly marshalled by that self-effacing champion of new music Ernest Bour, to the dense but translucent and often sensuous textures. Forty seconds of applause has been needlessly retained (albeit separately banded) at the close of CD2, while the generally idiomatic translation is occasionally hampered by mis-positioned track numbers (and track 7 on CD1 is 10 minutes longer than stated). No matter, this is a recording too long in coming for the recommendation to be other than entirely positive.