An award-winning Romanian-born pianist, a promising Estonian conductor and a distinguished German ensemble come together to offer a coupling which makes more sense than might be supposed. The Holocaust had the perverse effect of silencing many staunch advocates of German cultural supremacy. Even in the desperate conditions of the Nazis’ Theresienstadt concentration camp, Viktor Ullmann, murdered in 1944, followed a more recognisably German compositional path than fellow internees. Among his last preserved utterances were cadenzas to two Beethoven piano concertos. That said, the stylistic variety of his own work in the form is one of its more notable features (or weaknesses, depending on your point of view). Composed at a desperate time for the composer, between the entry of German troops into Prague and his own deportation, it lacks the kind of unmistakable ‘biological personality’ which Stravinsky found in the music of Prokofiev. Unexpectedly, perhaps, Ullmann’s score seems more indebted to the Russians’ percussive brand of piano-writing than to the expressive legacy of Schoenberg, his one-time teacher. Its four concise movements encompass urban hammering oddly reminiscent of Hollywood film noir and a more reflective (Mahler meets Scriabin) lyricism. The brief finale again fuses Bartókian ostinato with vaguely Gershwinesque harmony. The present performance is tighter and cooler than Konrad Richter’s (Bayer, 10/94 – nla).

That disc contained the Symphony extrapolated from the annotated manuscript of Ullmann’s Seventh Piano Sonata which, with the Third String Quartet, is one of his strongest surviving pieces. This one does something refreshingly different but then fails to make the most of it. Why not include the relevant Ullmann cadenza, even if only as a bonus track? There was room, surely. Instead we get the usual non-stop Beethoven, the orchestral contribution oddly weightless, strings fashionably attenuated, winds raspily invasive. Herbert Schuch contributes some beautiful lapidary playing which in more active passages can morph into the kind of exaggeratedly keen articulation that conveys too little in the way of exhilaration. Tempi are surprisingly sluggish. Phrases do not smile. WDR’s recorded sound, sometimes a tad woozy despite the crystalline attributes of the Cologne venue, yields a piano tone which tightens at higher decibels. I began to yearn for Mikhail Pletnev’s giant Blüthner, his frankly capricious approach to this music and the unashamedly full tone of his Russian National Orchestra (DG, 5/07). Tempting though it might be to give an uncritical welcome to this unique pairing, I was not entirely convinced by it.