Andreas N. Tarkmann, one of today's most creative arrangers of instrumental and vocal music, has personal reasons for setting himself the task of producing music for wind ensemble based on operas by Albert Lortzing: 'Lortzing's music was still very popular during my childhood in the 1960s and 1970s, and so omnipresent in the opera houses and media that his works accompanied me in my musical development. In them I heard highly appealing, mirthful music that was full of inspired melodies. Four decades later I noticed that his operas were gradually disappearing from the performance programs of German opera houses. Was it really possible that Lortzing's stage works, which I had cherished as brilliant and witty musical comedies, had become so antiquated and old-fashioned that they had not negotiated the leap into the twenty-first century?' (Andreas N. Tarkmann). The result: wonderful arrangements for winds splendidly demonstrating that Lortzing's music is of high quality and of an artistic vitality even without text and stage.