Ernst Vschubert

Zembrocal Musical is, like all the most exciting adventures, the result of an unexpected meeting between the acclaimed Dutch cellist Ernst Reijseger and the group from the Reunion Island, Groove Lele. The title of the album refers to one of Reunion's most famous dishes, zembrocal, which combines different ingredients such as meat, grain, rice and spices. Creating a musical blend as tasteful as zembrocal, Ernst Reijseger, Groove Lele and Mola Sylla successfully bring together their different musical universes and take us on a journey from the Netherlands to the Reunion Island.

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.

Heinrich Wilhelm Ernst (1812-65) was one of the leading musicians of his day, a friend of Berlioz, Chopin, Liszt and Mendelssohn, and for Joseph Joachim 'the greatest violinist I ever heard'. But the popular encore pieces by which Ernst is remembered today represent only a fraction of his output. This third CD — in a series of seven presenting all his compositions for the first time — shows the full range of his creativity and charm. The Élégie sur la mort d'un objet chéri is written in his most moving and melancholy vein, and the Airs hongrois variés push the virtuoso violin to its absolute limits. Between these extremes lie the lyricism of the Pensées fugitives, the inventiveness of his treatment of two Halévy operas and the high spirits of his fantasy on a Strauss waltz.

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.

Heinrich Wilhelm Ernst was nothing more than a stupendously talented violinist and a staggeringly inventive transcriber of other composers' music. And as this 2008 Hyperion recording by violinist Ilya Gringolts shows, that is more than enough to sustain his career during his lifetime and just enough to maintain his reputation after his death.