Ernst Vschubert

The Schola Cantorum in Basel has long championed the imaginative exploration of early music, creating expertly-researched programmes and encouraging superbly-performed interpretations with a close attention also to the most appropriate recording conditions. Such was the case with Amours amours amours, a disc of lute duos starting from music composed in the fifteenth century, recorded in 2001 by Karl-Ernst Schröder and Crawford Young.

The third and final volume of the Fesca Symphony series by Biermann and the NDR Radio Philharmonic, which received a great welcome! The symphonies and orchestral works of Bohemian composer Friedrich Ernst Pesca (1789-1826), who died at the early age of 37, all show the overflowing power, unique elegance, and ability to bring out the colors of the orchestra in the post-Beethoven era. In particular, Symphony No. 1, which captures the spirit of a 22-year-old young man, makes us realize that the praise he received from his contemporaries was not false. The performance of the conductor and orchestra, which introduced this hidden composer to the world, is full of affection, empathy, and confidence.

On her latest release, Flora Fabri interprets the highly praised sonatas and a fantasy by Ernst Wilhelm Wolf on a "tangent grand". The ingenious invention of this grand piano for the time around 1770 is an intermediate form of clavichord, harpsichord and fortepiano. When a key is struck, a wooden stick with a leather head is struck against the string from below, and a second stick dampens the string again. Wolf […] belongs not only […] among our classical and best composers in any subject, but is also original. More recognition seems hardly possible from the perspective of the Sturm und Drang: The introduction that Ernst Ludwig Gerber chooses in 1792 to his encyclopedia article on Ernst Wilhelm Wolf paints in a few words the picture of an original genius whose artistic uniqueness dominates a maximum of professional expertise. He was a pupil of Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel. In Gotha he became acquainted with the music of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach and Carl Heinrich Graun, which strongly influenced him. Above all, he appreciated the works of Bach, with whom he had a lifelong friendship. At the University of Jena he was mainly engaged in music, and he was given the direction of the Collegium musicum, which gave him the opportunity to perform his own compositions.

Johann Strauss Junior’s second operetta, Der Carneval in Rom, premiered in 1873 only one year before Die Fledermaus, and while the music is enjoyable enough, with several nice tunes, there is little in the score to presage the gorilla blockbuster soon to come. For one thing, Strauss wrote the music in the more romantic style of light opera because the work was originally scheduled to be mounted at the Vienna court opera, a place of more serious mien than the Theater an der Wien, then the home of the comic-oriented Viennese operetta.

Ernst Theodor Wilhelm Hoffmann (Königsberg, January 24, 1776 – Berlin, June 25, 1822), who changed his third name to Amadeus in honour to Mozart, is one of the best-known representatives of German Romanticism, and a pioneer of the fantasy genre, with a taste for the macabre. He was also a jurist, composer, music critic, draftsman and caricaturist.
As a musician, he composed about 80 works, including several operas, among them Aurora (1811-12), after Franz von Holbein, and Undine (1814), after Baron Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué's tale, one symphony, sacred and chamber music, as well as instrumental pieces.

Karl-Ernst Schröder was born in Eschweiler, Germany in 1958. He studied Renaissance guitar and lute with Professor Tadashi Sasaki at the Aachen Musikhochschule, attending masterclasses with Anthony Bailes and afterwards continuing his training in early music performance at Switzerland's Schola Cantorum Basiliensis in the lute classes of Eugen M Dombois and Hopkinson Smith. He collaborated with many Baroque and Renaissance ensembles including Mala Punica (Pedro Memelsdorff), Dolcissimo Sospiro, the Basel Consort, various groups associated with René Jacobs, the Badinierie Ensemble, the Lyra Consort, Concerto Köln, the Freiburg Barockorchester, Aurora/Enrico Gatti, Ludwig-Senfl-Ensemble (Michel Piguet), Sonatori Gelosi and Ensemble 415 (Chiara Banchini)…

ONKEL TOM — the solo project of Thomas "Angelripper" Such, bassist/vocalist of veteran German thrashers SODOM — will release a new album, "Bier Ernst", on September 28 via SPV/Steamhammer. The effort will consist of 21 tracks on two CDs, titled — in accordance with their lyrical content — "Bier" and "Ernst," respectively.

Ernst Pepping - Passionsbericht des Matthäus
Rundfunkchor Berlin / Stefan Parkman
EAC+LOG+CUE | FLAC: 291 MB | Full Artwork: 187 MB | 5% Recovery Info
Label/Cat#: Coviello Classics # COV 40801 | Country/Year: Germany 2008
Genre: Classical, Sacred | Style: Contemporary, Vocal

Ernst Pepping was once hot stuff, with conductors of Furtwängler's ilk recording his works. Indeed, there remains a famous 1943 recording of Pepping's Second Symphony with Furtwängler leading the Berliner Philharmoniker that has been reissued on a variety of labels. The conservative German modernist's star has sunk since then, however, and there are barely a handful of his works in print on CD. Pepping's Passion According to St. Matthew, for example, received over 500 performance in the first five years after its premiere, but this recording with Stefan Parkman leading the Rundfunkchor Berlin from 2007 is only the second of the digital age – and the first was from 1991…

In 1914, Franz Schmidt staged his opera Notre Dame at the Vienna State Opera to great acclaim. Immediately afterwards, he was looking for material for a new opera when he came across the novel Fredigundis by Felix Dahn, which is loosely based on historical events from the 6th century. Schmidt worked on the project from 1916 to 1921, with the premiere taking place in Berlin in December 1922. Schmidt’s music for Fredigundis marks the end of a development that runs through the so-called ‘Classic-Romantic’ period. The work is characterised by extensive chromaticism and a boundary-pushing expansion of the major-minor tonal system paired with dense counterpoint and perfect compositional artistry in the vocal parts. The dramatic mezzo-soprano Dunja Vejzovic, who became famous for her Wagner roles in Bayreuth and Salzburg, performed on all the major opera and concert stages of the world. The excellent cast of singers in this performance is supported by Austrian conductor Ernst Märzendorfer, who also mastered several instruments and composed piano concertos, incidental music and a ballet. On this recording, he conducts the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra, which has established itself as an opera orchestra through a long and successful collaboration with the MusikTheater an der Wien.