Here are three substantial concertos from the pen of the Czech-Jewish composer Ervín Schulhoff (1894-1942), the earliest being the second (though not labelled as such) of his piano concertos. Composed in 1923, it’s an exuberantly inventive, bewitchingly colourful and often affectingly tender creation in three linked parts, brimful of cocky personality and culminating in a veritable knees-up of a finale featuring a battery of percussion. Jazz plays a prominent role in this riotous movement, as it does in the memorably bluesy central section of the finale of the scarcely less appealing Concerto doppio for flute, piano, string orchestra and two horns. Conceived in 1927 for the French virtuoso René Le Roy, it’s a bustling concerto grosso stylistically akin to contemporaries such as Hindemith and Martin≤, and wears an altogether more approachable demeanour than the Concerto for string quartet and wind ensemble that Schulhoff composed in 1930. For all the immaculate craftsmanship on show, the latter proves a rather more obdurate offering – in the first two movements at least, a little of the irreverent gleam has gone out of the composer’s inspiration. Bringing up the rear is a deft orchestration of Beethoven’s Rage Over a Lost Penny that Schulhoff made for Czech radio in 1940 (the following year he took on Soviet citizenship, only to be arrested and interned by the Nazis).

Performances are unfailingly tidy and sympathetic, the 2007 recordings by Deutschlandradio Kultur excellent, and any readers yet to encounter the varied output of this fascinating figure (who succumbed to tuberculosis at the age of 48 in a Bavarian concentration camp) could do a lot worse than investigate this likeable release.