Alban Berg had reached his late twenties before striking out on his own compositional path. Even then the twin influences of Mahler and Schoenberg loomed large, yet the two most substantial compositions he completed before embarking on Wozzeck showed how imaginatively he was able to shed new light on formal models which those formidable exemplars had made their own.

The settings of aphoristic texts by “Peter Altenberg” (real name Richard Engländer) from 1912 make extreme demands on the singer and require a large orchestra, including harmonium and piano. Yet the impression is not one of extravagance: there is potent lyric beauty here, and the kind of melancholic regret which would reach its apotheosis in the closing bars of Lulu. Christiane Iven is no more successful than most singers in meeting such cruel demands as the ppp high A in the first song. But the performance as a whole captures the refined, nostalgic spirit of the music, and Iven has an easier time in the more Straussian atmosphere of the Seven Early Songs.

Berg wrote his Three Orchestral Pieces, Op 6, during 1914-15, and here the Mahlerian echoes are all-pervading. This recording conveys the weight and density of the musical argument, but there could have been a stronger sense of the emotional alarms and excursions that surge across the music’s expressionistic surface and show how close the eerie world of Wozzeck was in 1915.

With Christiane Iven on hand it’s a pity that Berg’s concert aria Der Wein was not recorded to complete the disc. But his arrangement of a Strauss waltz for string quartet, harmonium and piano is a reminder of that devotion to Viennese traditions which infiltrated his “real” music in so many subtle and troubling ways.