Heinrich Wilhelm Ernst: Violin Concerto in F-sharp minor, Op.23, Aaron Rosand (violin)

Heinrich Wilhelm Ernst: Violin Concerto in F-Sharp Minor, Op. 23 Aaron Rosand (violin), Orchestra Of Radio Luxembourg, Louis De Froment (conductor)

Heinrich Wilhelm Ernst (8 June 1812 – 8 October 1865) was a Moravian-Jewish violinist, violist and composer. He was widely seen as the outstanding violinist of his time and one of Niccolò Paganini's greatest successors. Not only did he contribute to polyphonic playing, but he also discovered new idiomatic ways to compose polyphonically conceived violin music.

“Forgotten though he may be nowadays, Ernst was famous not only in his own day but for many years afterwards. He was one of the relatively few virtuoso executants of his time warmly admired by Berlioz, who not only praised him in Journal des Debats reviews but conducted for him on several occasions, once giving Ernst the solo viola part in a performance of Harold in Italy in Russia. Like the other two men featured here, Ernst was a prodigy, making his first concert tour at the age of six-teen. He studied with Bohm and Seyfried, later Mayseder, at the Vienna Conservatory, but the dominant influence on him was that of Paganini, whose devoted fan Ernst was in his youth. He lived in Paris from 1832 to 1838, toured widely from 1838 to 1850, and settled in London in 1855, his public career cut short by illness. Ernst's entry in present-day reference works is now too brief to give the date (1849) of this concerto (which, along with an Elegie, Othello-Phantasie, and a Camaval de Venise, is cited among his onetime best-known works), but it remained enough of a favorite to be republished, ed. Arno Hilf, in 1896, and again — in a revision by H. Marteau — in 1913. According to Grove's Dictionary, it is sometimes subtitled "Concerto pathetique." There is a single movement only, Allegro moderato, common time, which probably could be analyzed as in sonata-form, but since the ballade-like opening has as many lyrical as declamatory thematic elements, and since what must be the true second theme doesn't appear for some four minutes, the predominant impression is that of a rhapsody, yet one by no means amorphous or loosely constructed. And while the influences of Berlioz and Paganini are not hard to spot, they are negligible in comparison with the vividness of Ernst's own personality —"captivating and dramatic" in Berlioz's apt description of his friend. Even the most bravura "display" writing is consistently subservient to strictly lyrical purposes, often taking the form of florid-arabesque decorations of the distinctive — poignantly nostalgic — melodism. Shortly before the end there is a solo in moto di recitativo passage and several Lento bars (horn calls and solo-violin responses) before the expansively songful resumption of Tempo I, leading to an Allegro molto doppio movimento, fir, ending.” (from Album Notes by R.D.Darrell, D.Nimetz and R.Freed)