Pennies from Heaven

Small treasures, as promised by the song Pennies from Heaven in the eponymous 1936 film with Bing Crosby, are assembled on the latest release from the Mandelring Quartet: favorites, individual movements and encores which the Mandelring Quartet regularly play in concert, but also works which don't fit into - or at the end of - standard concert programmes and are therefore presented on this album. Whether classical or non-classical, original works or felicitous arrangements for string quartet: all pieces are much loved by the ensemble. After spending weeks searching through their music archives, accumulated over more than thirty years, and sifting out the highlights from a huge body of works, the Mandelring Quartet now present a colorful mixture of miniatures from diverse genres across the centuries. They include rarely played compositions of the classical repertoire, such as a movement from the very first string quartet by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart; pieces which the Mandelring Quartet like to play as encores, such as the Allegretto, which Dmitri Shostakovich distilled from his ballet The Golden Age; tango classics such as Cafetín de Buenos Aires, stylishly arranged by Werner Thomas-Mifune; earworm candidates such as the Andante cantabile from Piotr Tchaikovsky's String Quartet in D major; trouvailles such as the adaptation of the St. Louis Blues, which the violinist Sebastian Schmidt discovered whilst on tour in the US when he visited a music shop in Los Angeles in order to buy a music stand because his suitcase had been lost. This compilation combines "Pennies from Heaven" from highly diverse musical spheres into a musical treasure trove - and at the same time presents the Mandelring Quartet at their most personal.