Heavy Breathing

The clarinet equivalent to the Ernst in terms of crazy difficulty is Arthur Benjamin's Le Tombeau de Ravel, but I couldn't find a performance on Youtube. Its equivalent in silliness, though, I found: Domenico Liverani's fantasy on the Cujus Animam from Rossini's Stabat Mater. OK, first you take a religious text solemn to the point of morbidity. Then you set it to a rather bouncy tune (marvellously performed by Luciano Pavarottti here). Finally you make a wildly florid fantasy from it.




Admit it, if you'd heard it before the Ernst you'd have thought it was even sillier than you do now.