Erwin Schulhoff’s Cinq Études de jazz
Frank Dodge, Spectrum Concerts Berlin
Duration: 00:12:54
I had not heard of Erwin Schulhoff until a video by David Hurwitz recommended his symphonies. Turns out he was a pretty decent composer of most classical music forms, and these piano pieces are very enjoyable. He was heavily influenced by jazz in the mid-1920s on, and this persisted until the early 1930s. Unfortunately, he was a Czech Jew; he was also a committed communist (having set the Communist Manifesto to music in 1932!) and things therefore took a not-unexpected turn for the worse in 1939: the Nazis had him imprisoned in the Wülzburg concentration camp in Bavaria, where he died of tuberculosis in 1942.