Schulhoff - Flammen review | Andrew Clements's classical album of the week

The Guardian 0

Very/Vermillion/Friede/ORF Vienna RSO/Bertrand de Billy
(Capriccio, two CDs)
Schulhoff’s work, recorded here in a staging from 2006, is a surreal reworking of Don Juan, with expressionist, neoclassicist and jazz elements

Czech-born Erwin Schulhoff died of tuberculosis in a concentration camp in Bavaria in 1942; he was 48. His only opera, Flammen (Flames), had been composed between 1923 and 1929, and was first performed in Brno in 1932. Schulhoff’s music was condemned as degenerate by the Nazis, and it was not until the 1990s that Flammen was staged again (in Leipzig), and also recorded in Berlin under John Mauceri for Decca’s Entartete Musik series. The Capriccio set comes from a production in Vienna in 2006, which was recorded by Austrian Radio.