Last year’s centenary gave us Dallapiccola’s summative work, the opera Ulisse (2/04), and this new collection of his later orchestral works is more than welcome. As Mario Ruffi’s informative booklet-note points out, their emergence was largely due to the composer’s success in the United States, as opposed to the hostility aroused in his native Italy – notably the Milan premiere of Due pezzi (1947), an orchestral expansion of violin-and-piano originals whose inspiration in frescos by Piero della Francesca is here made the more explicit.

Both this and Variazioni (1954) – an equally extensive reworking of the piano suite Quaderno musicale di Annalibera – appear on the Chandos disc from Gianandrea Noseda and the BBC Philharmonic. In the Pezzi, Noseda’s ‘Sarabanda’ verges on the enervating: Pascal Rophé makes greater sense of its subtle timbral continuity and is less overtly rhetorical in the ‘Fanfara e Fuga’. Noseda characterises each item of Variazioni as a distinct entity whereas Rophé shapes them into a cohesive and cumulative whole, emphasising the emotional impact that arises out of technical rigour.

The new disc includes the first modern recording of Dialoghi (1960) – the most hermetic of all Dallapiccola’s works in its inwardness and glacial, though never inexpressive, harmonies, played with keen eloquence by Jean-Guihen Queyras. A satellite to the in-progress Ulisse, Three Questions with Two Answers (1963) fairly encapsulates the opera’s metaphysical concerns in its motivic richness and sense of grand vistas – whether of nature or humanity – aspiring towards the infinite.

Rophé obtains responsive playing from Turin’s RAI orchestra, with sound that brings out detail and atmosphere in equal measure. If the Chandos CD is an ideal introduction to Dallapiccola’s music, the Stradivarius disc is a necessary follow-up and can be strongly recommended.