The only musical portraits generally on view of Alma Schindler-Mahler are those in her husband's Fifth and unfinished Tenth Symphonies. It has taken the enterprise of Bratislava's Opus Studio to focus the laser beam on the works of ''an intelligent young woman'' (Grove) who was forced to give up composition in order to arrange her life round the career of Gustav Mahler.
Small wonder that it took time for her even to submit her songs to her husband's scrutiny. When she did, he made two selections, published in Viennese editions of 1910 and 1924, and it is from both of these that Magdalena Hajossyova, principal soprano of the Slovak and East Berlin State Operas, has made her recital.
Alma was a student of Zemlinsky, and it shows. But so does a freedom and originality of vocal line and a bright strength of accompaniment which remind us that she was no less accomplished as a sculptor. What sets her songs apart, though, is their unpredictable, at times impatient, volatility and daring. In her two Novalis Hymns, for instance, the densely chromatic and almost simplistically diatonic are shamelessly juxtaposed; in her setting of Heine's Ich wandle unter Blumen, a plodding rhythmic start gives way to an impetuous, numbingly short-lived dream awakening.
Her harmonic boldness and her unfettered use of constantly shifting metre and inflection (songs are variously marked Plotzlich sehr schnell, mit freiem Vortrag, rubato) are not always ballasted by a sense of structural assurance. But what the songs lack in shape and unity, they gain in a fearless spontaneity of verbal response which reaches out to the listener.
I should like to hear a more sensuous soprano, a more resonant keyboard in the Strauss-like Ekstase, and a more considered and weighty response to the Heine setting. Hajossyova's is a youthful, light but often undernourished voice, adequately equipped to provide a gentle wakeup call for Gustav's Fruhlingsmorgen, but lacking both warmth and depth of colour for Liebst du um Schonheit and Um Mitternacht. There is more, too, in Des Knaben Wunderhorn's philosophy than either she or her pianist seem to dream of. The recording quality is clear, dry and austere: Alma Mahler now deserves both wider and warmer attention.'