Kathryn Stott is certainly avoiding the obvious in her impressive BIS series. Her previous solo collection was devoted to John Foulds (2/00), one of the enigmas of British music, whose involvement with the exotic led him to adopt an eclectic brace of styles with the occasionally disorientating harmonic admixture from non-Western modes. Here Stott tackles another lost genius, the differently cosmopolitan Erwin Schulhoff (1894-1942), whose restless idiom often seems to be raiding the archetypes without forging a truly personal manner. There’s everything from Schoenbergian expressionism to Stravinskian neo-classicism, plus a profound love of jazz, or what passed for jazz in the 1920s. Later on the Dadaist prankster would reinvent himself as a socialist realist composer of big symphonic statements.

As always in music where there is little performance tradition to speak of, the range of interpretative possibilities is wide, with performers sometimes inclined to over-emote, as if the oeuvre can only be considered in the light of the composer’s death at the hands of the Nazis. Stott’s approach seems uncommonly delicate, in so far as one can tell from the relatively inconsequential pieces that make up the bulk of this recital. The dearth of clinching melodic ideas will worry some, but the pianist’s fluent and eloquent playing should help assuage the doubts. The Elf Inventionen (1921), more harmonically adventurous than the rest in a style indebted to Debussy and Schoenberg, are, so Per F Broman’s booklet note assures us, notated without bar lines. The dedicatee was Maurice Ravel, yet the shimmys and tangos are put to one side.

Throughout, the recorded sound is agreeably spacious and very real, while the piano’s crisp top suits the predominant vein of ragtime-derived chic. True aficionados or new converts may need to seek out the brief but fascinating examples of the composer’s own pianism included on one of Decca’s groundbreaking Entartete Musik issues (12/95 – nla).