Ernst Ranglin

The four works on this album, all composed in the 1940s, embrace the lingering end of one musical tradition and the vigorous upsurge of another. Mellifluous, retrospective and playful, the Duet Concertino and Prelude to Capriccio were works of Richard Strauss’s Indian Summer – an old man’s refuge from the barbarism of war and its aftermath. What the public thought of them was incidental, even irrelevant. In the same decade, Aaron Copland and other younger American composers were reaching out, via radio, recordings and film, to a new mass audience. The European influence of Appalachian Spring and the Clarinet Concerto, though inescapable, was minimised in a populist, vernacular idiom that absorbed native folk music and jazz.

Ideal - Der Ernst Des Lebens
FLAC | Artwork | 24Bit 96kHz: 837 MB | 16Bit 44.1kHz: 268 MB
Cat#: Eitel Imperial, WEA 58 400 | Country/Year: Germany 1981
Genre: New Wave | Hoster: Filesonic/Uploaded

German new wave quartet Ideal were formed around the talents of Annette Humpe, Ernst Ulrich Deuker, Frank Jürgen Krüger, and Hans-Joachim Behrendt. They released three records in the early '80s on Tangerine Dream's Klaus Schulze's record label, the self-titled Ideal, Der Ernst des Lebens, and Bi Nuu, before disbanding in 1984.

The works on pianist Mary Kathleen Ernst’s Keeping Time span a broad swath of years, from Jing Jing Luo’s “Mosquito” (1991) to Stefania de Kenessey’s “Spontaneous D-Combustion” (2012). But at the album’s heart lies a through-line that, in Ernst’s own words, “celebrates the timelessness of friendship and the ways in which great music binds us together.” ...The styles on display are wide-ranging, encompassing jazz, neo-classical, post-modern and serial, and Ernst ... is sterling throughout.

Violin virtuoso and composer Heinrich Wilhelm Ernst was well known to audiences and musicians in the middle of the 19th century. At first he was a slavish follower of Paganini, whom he followed from place to place; often, by listening to the Italian master, he was able to reproduce his new works before they had been published or disseminated. But there is a kind of elegant artistry in some of his music that displays his own personality, and Joseph Joachim, the violinist most closely associated with the Beethoven/Brahms line of musical thinking, called Ernst the greatest violinist he had ever heard.