condition (record/cover): NM / NM | A portrait of the great Florentine soprano Liliana Poli (1928-2015), one of the essential voices of the postwar Italian and European avant-garde - the singer who premiered works by Nono, Berio, Ligeti, Bussotti and Haubenstock-Ramati, and whose combination of technical fearlessness and deep musical intelligence made her the first choice of composers working at the outer limits of vocal possibility. This Wergo recital, recorded in January 1970 at the SWF-Studio Baden-Baden, traces a personal lineage from early twentieth-century Viennese cabaret through the Italian dodecaphonic school to the politically engaged radicalism of Luigi Nono.

The disc opens with two of Arnold Schoenberg's Brettllieder - cabaret songs from 1901: Nachtwandler for voice, piano, flute, percussion and trumpet, and Galathea for voice and piano. Schoenberg the young satirist, still in the orbit of Wolzogen's Überbrettl, writing music of sharp wit and surprising tenderness - performed here with Maria Bergmann at the piano and a small ensemble including Joseph Paschek on flute and Walter Scholz on trumpet. Hanns Eisler's Die Römische Kantate for voice, two clarinets, viola and cello follows - Eisler, Schoenberg's most politically committed pupil, the collaborator of Brecht, here in a work that carries the Viennese inheritance into the terrain of exile and resistance. Luigi Dallapiccola's Quattro Liriche di Antonio Machado for voice and piano marks the turn toward Italy and toward serialism - Dallapiccola's lyrical, luminous dodecaphony, his settings of the great Spanish poet suffused with a warmth that the twelve-tone method was supposedly incapable of producing. Arrigo Benvenuti's Fiore d'arancio for voice and piano closes the first side - a rarity from the Florentine composer, a figure of Poli's own milieu.

Side B belongs to Luigi Nono. Djamila Boupacha, the soprano solo extracted from Canti di vita e d'amore (1962), is one of Nono's most concentrated and searing works - named after the young Algerian woman tortured by French soldiers during the war of independence, it demands of the singer an extremity of expression that goes beyond technique into moral witness. The voice alone, unaccompanied, carrying the full weight of political outrage and human solidarity. Canciones a Guiomar for soprano and instruments, recorded separately in 1967 at Sender Freies Berlin with the Radio-Symphonie-Orchester Berlin and women's chorus under Bruno Maderna, closes the disc - settings of Antonio Machado that return to the Spanish poetry already heard in the Dallapiccola, now transformed by Nono's radical musical language and political commitment. Maderna on the podium gives the orchestral writing a flexibility and responsiveness that perfectly supports Poli's voice.

The programme as a whole reads as a political and aesthetic autobiography: from Schoenberg's pre-atonal Vienna through Eisler's militant exile, Dallapiccola's Italian serialism, and finally Nono's fusion of the avant-garde with revolutionary politics. Poli navigates all of it with a voice of remarkable clarity and an interpretive intelligence that makes every stylistic shift feel inevitable.

LP, no insert. Texts on sleeve in German, Italian and Spanish with programme notes in German. Released on Wergo, WER 60051. Recorded January 1970, SWF-Studio Baden-Baden; Canciones a Guiomar recorded 1967, Sender Freies Berlin.