Schulhoff: Piano Concerto and Chamber Works

Prague never quite forgave itself for Schulhoff, and Schulhoff never quite forgave the century he was born into. Here was a composer who could write a foxtrot with the same hand that had absorbed Debussy’s harmonic sleight of hand in Paris, who sat in a POW camp dreaming up Dadaist scores, and who ended up dead of tuberculosis at Wülzburg in 1942, a Jew and a communist twice marked for extinction by the Reich. You cannot listen to this Delos disc without that biography humming underneath it. But the astonishing thing is how little the music itself begs for your pity. It is far too busy showing off.

The Concerto for piano and small orchestra, op. 43, is the reason to buy this disc, full stop. Twenty-one minutes, three movements, and an idiom that refuses to sit still. Schulhoff had one foot in the salons of late Romantic Prague and the other stomping around a Weimar cabaret, and he never bothered to pick a side. The first movement drifts through a kind of perfumed impressionist haze before modernist edges start cutting through the texture, almost as if Ravel had wandered accidentally into a Hindemith rehearsal. It’s the finale, though, marked Allegro alla jazz, that will make you sit up. Schulhoff scores it for an eighteen-piece percussion battery: cog rattle, cowbell, sleigh bells, castanets, tambourine, siren. A siren! In 1923! There’s a sostenuto passage buried in the middle of all that clatter that stops time entirely, a little pool of stillness before the foxtrot and Romany fiddling come roaring back for a genuinely riotous close. I’ve heard the piece described as a string of unrelated episodes strung together. I don’t buy it. The formal bones are tight underneath the surface glitter. This is a composer who studied with Reger, after all, and never entirely lost the German sense of architecture even while he was busy flirting with jazz band instrumentation.

The pianist here does not play it safe, and thank goodness for that. There’s real bite to the articulation in the outer movements, fingers that dig rather than caress, and a willingness to let the jazz-inflected syncopations sound genuinely vulgar rather than politely gestured at. Too many performances of Schulhoff’s jazz-adjacent scores sound like musicians in tuxedos condescending to slum it. Not this one.

The remaining works fill out a portrait rather than pad a program. The Five Pieces for string quartet, also from 1923, run through a gallery of dance forms, a tango, a tarantella-like scherzo among them, with an ironic tilt that owes something to Schulhoff’s exposure to the Second Viennese School without ever surrendering tonal footing entirely. The quartet playing is alert, occasionally raw at the edges in exactly the right way; this isn’t music that wants Juilliard-quartet polish.

The Suite for piano left hand, from 1926, belongs to that odd little sub-genre kicked into being by Paul Wittgenstein’s missing arm, though Schulhoff’s contribution has never enjoyed the visibility of the Ravel concerto written for the same patron. It’s leaner, more astringent, and the reading here doesn’t try to disguise the technical strain of the left hand doing a right hand’s work. If anything, that faint sense of reaching is part of the piece’s peculiar tension.

The Sonata No. 2 for violin and piano, from 1927, is the most “normal” piece on the disc, in the sense that it behaves like a violin sonata is supposed to behave, though even here Schulhoff can’t resist letting jazz harmony seep into the slow movement like water under a door. The violinist plays with a lean, vibrato-light tone that suits the astringency of the writing far better than a fatter, more Romantic sound would.

Susi, the solo piano miniature from 1937, is a small, plain-spoken thing, almost domestic in scale, written by the late 1930s under the shadow of Socialist Realism and increasingly hostile political circumstance. It’s a modest close to a disc that otherwise crackles with invention, but it’s the right close: history was about to cut this composer off, brutally and permanently, and there’s something quietly poignant about ending on so unguarded a note.

Delos’s engineering is clean without being clinical. You get real air around the percussion battery in the concerto, which matters given how much of that finale’s impact depends on hearing the siren cut through rather than get buried. I know of no direct rival album pairing quite this particular group of works. Schulhoff’s chamber and piano music has had its champions on disc, Hyperion and Decca both dabbled with individual works over the years, but this particular assembly, heard together, makes an argument for Schulhoff as more than a historical footnote or Nazi-era cautionary tale. He was a real composer, wildly uneven maybe, but capable at his best of writing music that still sounds, a century on, faintly dangerous. That’s not nothing. That’s rare.