In this album, Alma Mahler, lovers and friends, Julius Drake and I guide our listeners to a world of passion, beauty and intellectual inspiration: Vienna at the outset of the 20th century. An era of great affluence and unprecedented artistic blossoming where music, literature and the visual arts coalesced in a quite unique way. In this effervescent cultural environment, Alma Mahler was a muse and a young composer at the focal point of a range of influential movements. The deeply-felt emotions, aesthetic refinement and inner unease that characterised this period can all be heard in her own music and in that of the composers in her circle, represented on this album by Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Hans Pfitzner, Franz Schreker, Bruno Walter and Alexander Zemlinsky.