Rarely can so earnest a title have yielded such a winning disc. This collection by Steffen Schleiermacher of Czech piano pieces written between the wars demonstrates above all what an influence ragtime and jazz had in the emergent Czechoslovakia. That was particularly true of the composers who joined Devetsil, a creative movement whichpromoted new artistic trends in the recently formed country.

The aim in almost all 37 pieces here is to charm and not to shock. The earliest work is the set of five Pittoresken by Erwin Schulhoff, which appeared in 1919 – it makes me wonder whether he had heard any music by Scott Joplin, who had died just two years earlier. Certainly, the foxtrot which opens the suite is as direct a crib from The Entertainer as you could imagine, and the other movements have a similarly playful likeness to Joplin’s music.

Schulhoff, like Pavel Haas and Jaroslav Jezek, perished in the Holocaust, but unlike much of the music recorded in Decca’s sadly curtailed Entartete Musik series, the pieces here offer no premonition of future horrors. Jezek is represented by a set of 10 Bagatelles, some only a few seconds long, which all make their mark neatly and sharply, while his Bugatti-Step and Equatorial Rag, as the titles suggest, are directly jazzy in their inspiration, sparkling if a little repetitious.

Haas’s Suite of 1935 is full of rhythmic subtleties, many of them jazz-influenced, but there the influence of the French school of Les Six and others is also clear. So it is, too, in the eight genre pieces by Martin<= written in 1924/5, when he was already prominent on the Parisian scene, very typical of their period. Emil Franti?ek Burian survived into the Communist era in Czechoslovakia, having escaped death in a sequence of Nazi prison camps. He was as much an actor and writer as a composer, and is represented here by a delightfully slinky, if relatively conventional, slow waltz little more than a minute long.

Though Janácek was born half a century earlier than the others, he also belongs to the avant-garde. The fragments here belong to his Indian summer of creativity in the 1920s. Only one lasts over a minute, and most of them reflect his fascination with Czech or Moravian folk sources. The six chosen by Schleiermacher include Janácek’s two last pieces, written less than a week before he died. ‘A little gold ring’ (‘Zlaty krouzek’), the very last, is barely more than a flourish, but the lyrical ‘I’m waiting for you!’ (‘Cekám Te!’) is given in the expanded version, not published until 1994, which includes the passage written next to his final, improvised will, a document which for years stayed in the hands of lawyers. Helped by bright, well-recorded piano sound which reveals his clarity of articulation, Schleiermacher is a persuasive advocate throughout.