As the twenty first century progresses, Czech composer
Erwin Schulhoff's posthumous reputation has grown at an impressive rate. Only reintroduced to the public in the 1990s,
Schulhoff's music has come conspicuously into vogue, mainly in Europe, but audiences everywhere seem to find him especially interesting. And why not?
Schulhoff's music is dry, effervescent, edgy, witty, urbane, sophisticated, and suffused with the energy of the modern age. Phoenix Edition's Erwin Schulhoff: Solo Piano Works, featuring pianist
Margarete Babinsky with the assistance of two other pairs of hands in four-hand works --
Maria Lettberg and
Andreas Wykydal -- brings together a very appealing program of
Schulhoff's piano music, a good deal of it heretofore unknown on recordings. There is considerable concentration on his period of "esques"; suites of pieces that end in the suffix "esque" that date from the end of World War I to about 1920. These are a hodgepodge of different movements that range from rather angular and cubistic miniatures to passages that sound like slightly twisted silent movie accompaniments. The Six Ironies, Op. 34, are mechanistic, Dadaistic, and highly irreverent transformations of popular music rhythms, but the pièce de resistance are the Jazz Improvisations (1930), pieces for which
Schulhoff only composed one part, with the other to be improvised. This could be a recipe for disaster, but it isn't because
Babinsky is familiar with the Continental Style and knows not to wander off into territories that would tend to post-date both
Schulhoff and his pieces, though secretly one wonders what
Keith Jarrett or
Chick Corea might do with the improvised part!
Nevertheless, the Phoenix Edition's recordings are warm, friendly, and reproduce the sound of
Babinsky's piano well, and musically it is hard not to love what's here. For English speakers the garbled liner notes are liable to open more questions than they answer and Phoenix Edition's Erwin Schulhoff: Solo Piano Works is both highly enjoyable and an excellent introduction to the piano music of
Schulhoff.