MANDELRING QUARTETT - Pennies from Heaven (2020)

"Whenever it rains, it rains star money from the sky. Don't you know that every cloud contains star money? You'll see your luck fall from the sky all over town. "Be careful that your umbrella is upside down, and exchange it for sunshine and flowers..." (from: Lyrics Pennies from Heaven by Johnny Burke)

The current CD of the Mandelring Quartet brings together small treasures, as promised by the song Pennies from Heaven from the 1936 film of the same name starring Bing Crosby: favourite pieces, single movements, encores, which the Mandelring Quartet regularly plays in concerts, but also works which stylistically do not fit into or follow a usual programme and which now find their place here. Whether classical or non-classical, original literature or successful arrangements for string quartet: all works are highly appreciated by the ensemble! For weeks, the members of the Mandelring Quartet have been searching through their music archives, which have been accumulated over more than 30 years, and have sifted out the best from the huge fund of works. The result is a colourful mixture of miniatures from the most diverse genres and throughout the centuries. Rarely played compositions of the classical repertoire are among them, like a movement from the very first string quartet by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart; pieces that the Mandelring Quartet likes to play as an encore, like 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; catchy tunes such as the Andante cantabile from Peter Tchaikovsky's String Quartet in D Major; triumphs such as the arrangement of St. Peter's Symphony in Buenos Aires. Louis Blues, which the violinist Sebastian Schmidt discovered during a tour of the USA in a music shop in Los Angeles when he was actually looking for a music stand because of a lost suitcase

The compilation unites "Sterntaler" from the most diverse musical worlds into a musical treasure chest - and at the same time gives insight into a very personal side of the Mandelring Quartet.