This is an issue that matches up sublimely with the attainments of the Internet. While listening to the music, those interested can delve into all sorts of information (in Dutch) concerning the composers and lots more on the Ebony Band website. Superbly done, without any fancy stuff but with the utmost effort to gather together as much information as possible on a whole crowd of composers who (today) we hardly know. This disc features music by five of these who were active in Prague between the world wars, or, to be more precise, between 1922-1937. It is sometimes forgotten that Prague lies precisely halfway along the straight line from Berlin to Vienna; consequently, it was for centuries a prominent centre of the arts, and especially music, theatre and opera. Hitler's assumption of power brought all this to an end - an end of which we still have no clear picture; but there is hope for better times, with no small thanks to Werner Herbers and his Ebony Band. 

Firstly, there is Miroslav Ponc (1902-1976), a man with many faces, in the most literal sense, for he was also a visual artist. One of his paintings graces the cover of this CD and brings Piet Mondriaan directly to mind. Ponc was also a man of the theatre, and he busied himself in Prague with Jean Cocteau's libretto for the ballet Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel, with music by members of the Group des Six. Ponc wrote a new score, a crazy, Dadaist jumble for the exotic combination of a piano and harmonium tuned in quarter tones, percussion, E flat and B flat clarinets, bassoon, trombone and violin - a wierd mishmash, and so it sounds. As one of those involved said: it is as if gravity pulls sideways. In this form the score consists only of six short movements, which on this recording are spread strategically, sounding like barbed wire to clearly separate the composers from one another. This issue can't fail to succeed, if only because of the live recording at a concert in the Vredenburg concert hall in Utrecht; the other pieces were recorded in studio sessions at the Muziekgebouw aan 't IJ in Amsterdam.

Three other pieces by Ponc are on the disc: a little five-movement suite for cello and piano (Daniël Esser and Gerard Bouwhuis), seven miniatures for piano (Bouwhuis) and five ‘polydynamic’ ensemble pieces. The polydynamics lie in the fact that each instrument follows its own dynamic pattern, a serial experiment in which Ponc was far ahead of this time, though it is in the tonal idiom of the 1920s. Free and fearless.

With his Sechs Miniaturen für Kammerorchester Hanns Aldo Schimmerling (1900-1967) fits precisely into the Vienna of the Verein für musikalische Privataufführungen of Arnold Schönberg and his disciples. A reaction against the mammoth instrumentations of the collapsing romantic edifice, it was a venue for individual initiatives and new sounds - the premature birth of the Schönberg Ensemble. Schönberg in 1918 in Vienna and Schimmerling in 1922 in Prague – and that's how it sounds.

In his Kleine Ouvertüre (1927) Emil Frantisek[#spelling] Burian (1904-1959) tumbles infectiously through the liberating discovery of Dada and jazz. In the song cycle About Children the influence of Leos Janácek on the younger Czech generation is particularly clear. Neither liner notes nor website say a word about the background of this instrumental version of the songs, originally written for the piano in 1924; it apparently stems from the composer himself.

That is not the case in the six songs opus 17 by Viktor Ullmann (1898-1944), a tragic figure who restlessly trudged through life until the last episode of his existence, in Camp Terezin, where he found the painful peace to compose one work after another, using old deportation lists to write on. These songs date from 1937, but whether these were happier times remains doubtful. Fortunate, however, is the choice of the composer Geert van Keulen to orchestrate this wonderful music, so sensitively sung by the mezzo-soprano Barbara Kozelj.

Alois Hába (1893-1973) is the Grand Old Man of this company. He not only lived longest of all, but even survived the communist terror of the post-war years to enjoy a degree of official recognition. His reputation is based primarily on his experiments with temperaments and micro-intervals. A piano whose three manuals differ by a third of a semitone was just one of his inventions. For the Czech Nonet he composed four nonets for wind quintet, violin, viola, cello and double bass. The second of these is the Fantasie für Nonett im Siebentonsystem, written in 1932. No panic, this is not a complicated note system but simply the white keys of the piano from D to D - the so-called Dorian scale. Hába wrote 23 vignettes which ingeniously overlap. The Ebony Band in top form (including Emily Beynon and Gustavo Nunez, section leaders of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra) guarantees an unforgettable listening experience.

This goes for the entire CD, including technical quality and presentation, to say nothing about the terrific website. Long live the Ebony Band.