This collection will appeal to readers caught up in the resurgence of interest in the work of the post-Janacek Czech-German school suppressed by the Nazis. Less committed listeners should perhaps begin elsewhere: Petr Matuszek performs sensitively enough but he is less than secure of pitch in the more harmonically exploratory items; an over-resonant recording does his pianist no favours, and the absence of translations of the song texts is unforgivable when the music is mostly unfamiliar. Of all the composers who exercised the last of their creative energies in Theresienstadt (Terezin), Pavel Haas was perhaps the least touched by Schoenbergian expressionism. His Seven Folksongs, Op. 18 were written shortly before his deportation, while the impressive Four Songs on Chinese Poetry were composed and premiered in the camp three months before he was sent on to Auschwitz. There is some want of projection in these performances.
Hans Krasa’s best-known composition is the children’s opera Brundibar but he wrote in a variety of forms, displaying a more rakish, cosmopolitan sensibility. Once again, an early cycle, aphoristic Berg-cum-Ravel, is contrasted with later music fashioned for concert performance in the unimaginable circumstances of the camp. Schulhoff’s self-confidently irrational set stands somewhat apart. It comes from his jazz-tinged avant-garde period, seemingly intent on sending up a range of idioms. You wouldn’t guess that, by the time of his death in the Bavarian internment camp of Wulzburg, the Dadaist prankster had remade himself as a socialist realist composer of big statements, and a Soviet citizen.'