Lovers and Friends
Raoul Steffani, Julius Drake
In this album, Alma Mahler, lovers and friends, Julius Drake and I take our listeners on a journey to a world of passion, beauty and intellectual inspiration: Vienna at the beginning of the 20th century. An era of great prosperity and unprecedented artistic flourishing, in which music, literature and visual arts merged in a unique way. In this vibrant cultural environment, Alma Mahler was a muse and a young composer at the centre of a number of influential movements. The deeply felt emotions, aesthetic refinement and inner restlessness that characterised this period can be heard in her own music and that of the composers in her circle, represented on this album by Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Hans Pfitzner, Franz Schreker, Bruno Walter and Alexander Zemlinsky.
