This interesting programme of (apart from the relatively familiar Zemlinsky items) rarities from turn-of-the-century Vienna was recorded at a public concert in 1980, and there is rather a lot of background noise: a quiet hiss as of air conditioning, coughs, creaks and page turns, and a few more puzzling sounds: is it a table-lamp on the piano that rattles during the second Zemlinsky song Does a member of the audience really fall out of his or her seat a few bars later? I would imagine, too, that the mastertape has been stored for rather a long while: there are patches of preand post-echo (Dorow haunted by faint ghosts of herself) in the songs by Joseph Marx in particular.
One notices these things all the more because Dorow's is such an intimate art: the value of a live recording of such a singer is to hear how she holds her audience with subtle inflections and colourings of a finely-drawn, unbroken line. There is a kinship of idiom between all three composers here, but she and her responsive and intelligent pianist are good at individualizing them. At, for example, distinguishing the 21-year-old Schreker (post-Brahms, but with a touch of modish nineties melancholy) from his 31-year-old self, a late convert to Jugendstil, much concerned with images of long-stemmed flowers in tall slender vases, with sinuous columns of incense-smoke, and with the grey-green chromaticisms that are their musical equivalents. At both periods, however, he could snap out of his prevailing mood, in 1899 to write an exuberant, slightly Mahlerian comic song about a cuckoo (Dorow's audience are such impassive miseries that they can't manage so much as an appreciative giggle between them), in 1909 to indulge in the alluring pleasures of simple major chords and heterophony.
Joseph Marx looks worthy of future investigation, too: carefully choosing texts from the Italian Songbook that Wolf had not used he manages at least three settings that would earn a place in an appendix to Wolf's volume, and shows elsewhere that he can support a fragile but well-sustained vocal line with an accompaniment of real character. Neither he nor Schreker, on this evidence, have so positive a musical personality as Zemlinsky (Dorow brings to the Maeterlinck songs an attractively dusky, almost diseuse manner that emphasizes the quiet firmness of their lines), but singer and pianist make a good case for reconsidering the border territory (between Mahler's and Wolf's nineteenth century and Schoenberg's and Berg's twentieth) that they occupy. Well worth trying, if you don't find the incidental noises too distracting. A very close recording otherwise (for my taste a bit too close).'