This album, recorded for the Viennese EntArteOpera festival, offers four works which are all more or less of a piece with "degenerate art". First, the composer, Englishwoman Ethel Smyth, whose crime was to be a feminist in an epoch when everyone, and the Nazis in particular, thought that women had no place downstage. Her 1928 Concerto for Violin, Horn and Orchestra proves the contrary, and powerfully. There follows the Concertino for Violin, Clarinet and Orchestra by Vítězslava Kaprálová, a Czech composer and conductor – a student of Novak and Talich in Prague, and then of Martinů, Nadia Boulanger and Charles Munch, all before the age of 25, when she went into her exile in France. Her style is still marked by borrowings from her teachers. But if she had lived, she would have had a flourishing career. Karl Amadeus Hartmann, was never exactly a "degenerate", but he lived in self-imposed internal exile in Germany until the end of the war, and remained silent – although his music was still being played abroad. His 1939 Concerto funèbre is certainly well-named. And finally, Martinů: the Concerto for Piano, Violin and Orchestra of 1953, a work of exile – which is among the composer's most poignant works. © SM/Qobuz