Memorable Heritage: The Music of Erwin Schulhoff

If Bruno Walter and Leonard Bernstein are credited with bringing Mahler to the attention of the whole world's concert-going public, then heartfelt gratitude must be extended to James Conlon for his devotion to composers who perished in the Holocaust. Under the rubric "Recovering a Musical Heritage," Conlon organized a set of three concerts and two lectures at The Juilliard School totally given over to a retrospective of the chamber and orchestral works of Erwin Schulhoff (1894-1942).

Schulhoff was born in Prague and considered by Hitler's henchmen as doubly undesirable: he was both a Jew and a Marxist, and the Nazis wasted no time after their occupation of Czechoslovakia to apprehend and ship him off to the Wülzburg concentration camp where he died of tuberculosis. Little was known of his music following the war years and conductor Conlon's initiative has been a large step in rescuing this colorful, varied, and imaginative music from slipping into an eternal oblivion.

The orchestral concert at Lincoln Center's Alice Tully Hall (April 30) under Juilliard's auspices included the 1921 Suite for Chamber Orchestra, the Concerto for Piano from 1923, and the massive and powerful Symphony No. 5 (1938), not to be premiered until 1965 in Weimar. While traces of a mélange of composers, including Shostakovich and Schulhoff's countrymen Dvorak and Janacek, may be detected, the music of the Fifth Symphony has a character all its own and the brilliance of the orchestration is everywhere in evidence.

Conlon had conducted the U.S. premiere at last summer's Aspen Music Festival and this was the first New York performance. The Symphony No. 5 is published by Editio Bärenreiter Praha.