No, I hadn’t either. And my guess is that, unless aware of CPO’s five earlier volumes of Dora Pejačevic´’s music, few have. She was born in 1885 into one of Croatia’s most distinguished aristocratic families and, despite studies with minor figures in Dresden and Munich, seems to have been a largely self-taught musician. Her most productive period was from 1913, the date of her G minor Piano Concerto (the first work of its kind by a Croatian), and 1920. Her 58 opus numbers include a symphony, chamber works, piano solos and songs, 106 titles in all. Having married in 1921, she died in 1923 following complications after the birth of her first child.

Quite why she has fallen off the map so completely is intriguing. Pejačevic´ is no genius but, as can be heard on this sixth volume, more than merely accomplished, well able to hold her own in the company of other late-Romantic fin de siècle composers whose reputations are assured. Indeed, her setting of Karl Kraus’s poem ‘Verwandlung’ (‘Transformation’), the outstanding work on this disc, won praise from Arnold Schoenberg (with the reservation that ‘naturally a woman cannot be a creator of music’). Ingeborg Danz sings this, ‘Liebeslied’ (a Rilke setting) and the two brief Schmetterlingslieder with moving simplicity.

Judging from her Piano Concerto, Pejačevic´ must have been an extremely good pianist. It’s a showy virtuoso vehicle in the traditional three movements: its dense orchestration put me in mind of Marx’s Romantic Concerto at times, its rhetorical flourishes of Sgambati’s own G minor Concerto at others. It’s well worth hearing but ultimately lacking, I think, the originality and melodic appeal to win it a place alongside the best of its kind. It certainly keeps the excellent Oliver Triendl on his toes, so to speak, Howard Griffiths and the the Brandenburg State Orchestra offer the same degree of ardour and expressive lyricism as they bring to the vocal items.