HK Gruber (b. 1943)
Piano Concerto (2014-16)
Short Stories from the Vienna Woods for orchestra (2000s)
Castles in the Air for solo piano (1981)
Frank Dupree (piano)
ORF Vienna Radi Symphony Orchestra/HK Gruber
rec. 2024, Vienna; Stuttgart
Capriccio C5536 [73]
Gruber is an enigma. Indubitably contemporary, in temporal terms, he seductively cozens the ear and the mind. He is faintly jazzy, a little like Friedrich Gulda. Take the ten-year-old Piano Concerto, here charmed into aural action by Frank Dupree as soloist. This work is one of speckles and torrents of notes all mingled with a very crowded and active orchestral canvas. You could compare its aural effect with a Mills bomb going off in a universe peopled by a concatenation of familiar works – Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue (MTT with the ‘composer’ on Sony), Shostakovich’s Second Piano Concerto (try Bernstein on Sony), Walton’s Sinfonia Concertante (Handley on Dutton, originally Conifer) and Messiaen’s Transfiguration (Dorati on Decca-Universal). The Gruber Concerto is a work in one continuous statement over 24 minutes. Its ideas and packaging are big and burly, granitic, splenetic and showy. The recording by Capriccio is glorious, precise and stone-cracker impactful (which is also true of the other two works here). It’s all thoroughly enjoyable: a showcase in which awe and pleasure duke it out. An accolade to Dupree for giving this work an airing.
The Short Stories from the Vienna Woods has a more edgy, crystal-glinting surface. It’s often carborundum-abrasive but just as often adrift in romantic downy balm. It is structured in a series of seven ’tiles’. It’s also uproarious and full of engaging tomfoolery. There are moments when this could be a series of old-fashioned music-hall vignettes. Galloping circus steeds and beguiling charmers mobilise their charms. This canvas is steeped in sentiment and sentimentality. There are moments, too, when the same Sondheimian motivation that breathed irrepressible life into A Little Night Music sidles in to this Gruber work. The seventh movement (Prayer) has Gruber turning in a very affecting way towards Kreisler, but Kreisler filtered through Pärt. The whole work is fantastical and lushly Viennese. The last movement has the saxophone sauntering along. Capriccio’s engineers display stunning extroversion in this work, and indeed in the Concerto.
The disc concludes with the world premiere recording of Castles in the Air: a four-movement construct. It’s for solo piano and conjures a phantasmal scene. Its nephews in music are such disparate works as Oliver Knussen’s The Way to Castle Yonder for orchestra and Marx’s Castelli Romana. I noticed that, in the third movement, it casts sidewise glances towards the seductions of his Vienna Woods work. Allow for the fact that this piece seems like an afterthought at the end of such a full-on pair of orchestral statements. Even so, it does serve to step the emotional temperature down.
The performances are unflinchingly captured; listeners might flinch but they soon acclimatise to the headlong kinetics of it all.
The helpful notes are by Frank Harders Wuthenow.
Rob Barnett
Other review: Paul RW Jackson
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