Luigi Nono’s Quando stanno morendo, Diario polacco No 2 resonates in sympathy with the human condition. Commissioned by the Warsaw Music Festival at the end of 1981, the work never saw the light of day in Poland because political censorship led to the festival being disbanded. Nono wrote that his desire to complete the work was strengthened by this gerrymandering, and he dedicated it to “my Polish friends and comrades in exile, in hiding, in prison and at work where they continue to resist”.

Written for four female voices, electronics evolving in real time with clandestine shadowing from bass flute and cello, Nono’s setting of texts by East European poets, including Boris Pasternak, has a vulnerable, fragmented and ambiguous beauty – affirmative and unquestioning beauty would hardly be appropriate. His vocal-writing is firmly rooted in the contours of the Renaissance choral music he so loved, but is deliberately alienated. Chords hover around tritoneinterrupted progressions that deny resolution, and the four voices spend much of their time clinging obsessively to each other as though on the brink of asphyxiation.

Nono constantly pushes for further extremes – his lyrical gestures become increasingly frail and halting, as electronics add layers of disembodied humming. Later in the piece electronics are also deployed to place earsplitting walls of hectoring white noise into opposition against the voices: the instruments have a mediating role, worrying the progress of the singers, or encasing them with electronically manipulated mantras.

Stradivarius’s Quando stanno morendo was for many years the only available version and, now reissued, remains a clear and sonically faithful realisation of Nono’s intentions. But Neos’s new recording, made in June 2007, is noticeably more matured and inside the music. The pace is slowed (38' verses 33') and the vocalists enunciate with great purpose and character. Another advance is the extraordinary range of the recording: each subtone vocal whisper is made to count, and those blasts of electronica hit like terrifying body blows.

However, the Stradivarius disc is worth considering for A Pierre (for a similar chorusinstrumental- electronic ensemble) and Post- Prae-Ludium for tuba and live electronics: both are sonically rich and exacting examples of Nono’s late music. Neos add the rarely heard Guai ai gelidi mostri from 1983, which dives ever deeper into the fleeting non-gestures and structural enigmas that make Nono challenging but obligatory.