Erlkonig / Le Carnaval De Venise / Polyphonic Studies

Erlkonig / Le Carnaval De Venise / Polyphonic Studies Naxos 8.572575

• Composers: Heinrich Wilheim Ernst, Stephen Heller
• Arranger: Heinrich Wilheim Ernst
• Artists: Gordon Back, Josef Spacek

The Moravian Heinrich Wilhelm Ernst is a dazzling example of the nineteenth-century violinist-composer, of whom the greatest was Ernst’s sometime rival, Paganini. Indeed it was the Italian who persuaded Ernst to follow the life of a touring virtuoso, in which role he was to perform with the greatest musicians in Europe, earning the admiration of men such as Chopin and Mendelssohn. The Elégie sur la mort d’un objet chéri, mentioned by Tolstoy in The Kreutzer Sonata, was one of the best-known violin works of the century, and the Polyphonic Studies offer a compendium of violin technique on a par with the works of Paganini himself.

Erlkonig / Le Carnaval De Venise / Polyphonic Studies Review

This has to be one of the most remarkable discs of pure violin virtuosity in a catalogue already well-endowed with extraordinary displays of technical brilliance. Moravian-born, Heinrich Wilhelm Ernst, followed in the footsteps of Paganini, though his music goes further into the world of the impossible. In the concert hall Ernst amazed audiences as he toured around Europe, never putting down roots until he fell victim to a strange and unidentified illness, at which time he began to concentrate on composition until his untimely death in 1865 at the age of 53. Apart from the lyric Elegie, this new release concentrates on showpieces that including passages where the violin plays the melody, the accompaniment in double-stopping, and a bass line achieved with left-hand pizzicato, all at one and the same time—or so it appears to the ear. Indeed the violin part at times becomes so complex that it was written on two staves with double-stopping in rapidly moving passages, and leaps around the fingerboard that beggar belief. In the short Trio we readily believe that three people must be playing, while the challenges of Le Carnaval de Venise make one smile in amazement. The soloist is the Czech-born, Josef Spacek, the laureate in the 2012 Queen Elisabeth Competition in Brussels, and now the concert-master of the Czech Philharmonic. David Denton – David’s Review Cor­ner