Schulhoff: "Concertos alla Jazz"

Aleksandar Madzar (piano), Bettina

Wild (flute), Hawthorne String

Quartet, Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie/Andreas Delfs, Erwin Schulhoff (piano).

Decca 444 819-2 (78 mins). Dial-a-track code: 1421

The Prague born composer Erwin Schulhoff (1894-1942) had a chequered career. As a youngster he was encouraged by Dvorak. He mixed with the Dadaists, embraced the world of jazz (introduced to it, apparently, via George Grosz's extensive record collection), was a successful concert pianist, set the text of the Communist Manifesto music, and died, a Soviet citizen, in a concentration camp at the age of 48.

In view of the composer's background and associations, the three concertos collected on the latest Decca Schulhoff CD - a Piano Concerto, a Double Concerto for Flute and Piano, and a Concerto for string quartet and wind instruments - are, well, surprisingly comfortable. Perhaps when the pieces were being heard for the first time the novel exoticism of their jazz borrowings may have been felt to constitute substance and statement enough, but today, the voice of Schulhoff himself can be felt to be too enigmatic a presence.

The muted shimmering slow movement of the Piano Concerto casts a certain spell (and Schulhoff shows a well developed fondness for neoLisztian cascades), but there's ultimately a feeling that not very much is happening, and the prettily jaunty wrong note passages of the Double Concerto explore an idiom that yielded far more fruitfully to composers of French sensibility. A much stronger impression is made by the sharper instrumental tang of the wind writing in the Concerto for string quartet.

The CD also includes nine of Schulhoff's jazzy solo piano pieces as recorded by the composer in 1928. Like the larger works, they're really interesting to know about, but hardly likely to draw one back for repeated listening.

Ravel: "Daphnis and Chloe; La valse" Rundfunkchor Berlin, BPO/Pierre Boulez Deutsche Grammophon 447 057-2 (70 mins)

Dial a track code: 1531

A contemporary view of Schulhoff rated his importance as being "one of the first to have carried through this experiment of transplanting contemporary dance into serious music and ... to have been able to score it elegantly". Ravel, by contrast, had a highly developed interest in reviving the dance forms of the past, though his longest dance work the Diaghilev commissioned full length ballet Daphnis and Chloe, is in a completely different vein and this "musical fresco" (the composer's description) contains some of the most sheerly beautiful diaphanous music ever written.

Daphnis and Chloe has been, for me, one of those works which can generate a sense of anticipation almost too great to be fully satisfied. Boulez's new recording, with the Berlin Philharmonic on the best of its very fine form, is sensual, precise, atmospheric, and (so important when it comes to the wordless chorus) ravishingly perspectived. The performance of La valse is more emotionally distanced, over calculated for my taste, but undoubtedly appealing as a sonic spectacle.

Harrison Birtwistle: "Tragoedia; Five Distances; 3 Settings of Celan; Secret Theatre". Christine Whittlesey (soprano), Ensemble InterContemporain/Pierre Boulez Deutsche Grammophon 439 910-2 (76 mins)

Dial a track code: 1641

Composition, to Harrison Birtwistle, "is seeing how things can be juxtaposed dramatically in a landscape of intuition". The roughness of his material and the eruptiveness of his musical thinking bare tempered by the strong organic binding of his structures - though the music, it must be said, remains challenging.

Birtwistle ranks highly in the European perspective of British music - witness this new disc from Pierre Boulez's Ensemble InterContemporain, which ranges from the crucially successful Tragoedia of 1965 (after which the composer sold his clarinets and devoted himself to composition) to Five Distances of 1992 and three of a series of eight Celan settings begun in 1989. The major work, however, is the nearly half hour long Secret Theatre of 1984, glinty, sinewy, highly charged music, played here with both sensitivity and brilliance.