Long thought to be lost, the full score of Bruno Maderna’s Requiem was rediscovered in an American library in 2006, some 40 years after it was composed. No less a figure than Virgil Thomson had been impressed with this monumental modernist work, the outpouring of a precociously talented 26-year-old. Thomson’s efforts to mount a performance in the US came to nought. In the meantime, Maderna had discovered serial music, a style with which he was preoccupied for the rest of his relatively short life.

Scored for four vocal soloists, chorus and an orchestra that forsakes woodwind for three pianos, the Requiem is indebted to the ground-breaking theoretical and stylistic advances of Hindemith and Stravinsky, but on a dramatic level, Verdi’s Requiem casts a long shadow. 

Apocalyptic outbursts are abundant, but Maderna is at his most effective when he is not attempting to channel the grandiloquence of the operatic master. Take, for instance, the Recordare section of the Dies irae with its delicately accompanied tenor...