There’s something not quite right in this disc’s title – ‘Czech Degenerate Music, Volume IV’ – about the deployment of Nazi terminology here. It’s 10 years since a splurge of Erwin Schulhoff recordings established him as a talent worthy of attention. If there is any problem today with his creativity it must surely relate to its unstable, protean nature. Like many of the lost, inter-war generation of Czech-German-Jewish composers, Schulhoff toyed with a range of idioms from Schoenbergian expressionism to Stravinskian neo-classicism. His love of jazz is well known, but he was also prone to an open-air modal flavour (think Holst or Warlock!) giving even the drier scores represented here a surprisingly distinctive profile. By the time of his premature death as a victim of Nazi persecution in 1942, this Dadaist prankster had again remade himself as a Socialist Realist composer of big statements and, latterly, Soviet citizen.

That said, his trajectory of exploration is not the point of the present collection which sticks rigidly to music from the 1920s, if not his best then certainly his busiest period. None of the material is new to disc: the Sextet, the most remarkable of these scores and the only one to set out in wholeheartedly expressionist vein, is positively ubiquitous. Even so, the warmth and precision offered by the latest recording techniques give Praga a head start. The performances are distinguished, too, drawing on the membership of string quartets that began life in the early 1970s, ideally placed to bring out echoes of Bartók and Janácek.

While the Prazák Quartet make a lovely sound, I should point out that a differently constituted Kocian Quartet and (other) friends included both the String Sextet and the Duo in Supraphon’s extensive Schulhoff series. There are also sharper, leaner, more distinctive Petersen Quartet versions of the Five Pieces and the Sextet and Duo. On the Praga issue it’s not quite clear who plays in the Duo. Well worth trying nevertheless.