Austrian National Day Concerts

HK Gruber & Gustav Mahler

7.8.2018
HK Gruber  (c) Jon Super
HK Gruber in the focus

One of Austria’s great sons, the Viennese composer, chansonnier and double bass player HK Gruber celebrated his 75th birthday in January of this year. In 2002, he was awarded the Grand Austrian State Prize for Music. He became internationally successful and well-known not least because of his pandemonium Frankenstein!! which, since its premiere in 1978, has been played worldwide more than a thousand times.

Frankenstein!! A pan-demonium for Chansonnier and Orchestra

The origin of the composition goes back to his Frankenstein Suite, created a few years earlier. Gruber had written this for the Viennese ensemble “MOB art & tone ART” in whose founding Kurt Schwertsik and Otto M. Zykan had been involved also. The self-designation of the composer trio plays on its two main concerns, namely proximity to people and musical keys: “Reinstating tonality was a means of communication”, according to Gruber. “The greatest simple denominator should be to create a bridge between educated and uneducated listeners.” As an interpreter, HK Gruber builds another bridge between the stage and the audience himself.

Poems of HC Artmann are the textual basis

HC Artmann

Poems from HC Artmann’sAllerleirausch. Neue schöne Kinderreime [Noises, Noises, All Around: Lovely New Children’s Rhymes]” form the textual basis for Frankenstein!! where Gruber often appears as a chansonnier. But, as is so often the case with Artmann, the apparently harmless turns into its opposite. Gruber elaborates further and interprets the subversive as a political statement: “The monsters of political life have always tried to hide their real faces and, all too often, they have succeeded in doing so.”

Concert

However, the Frankenstein announced in the title does not surface himself but remains “that figure behind the scenes whom we forget about, at our risk. Hence the exclamation marks”. In terms of music and sound, Gruber took his orientation from Artmann’s style of writing and adopted the latter’s seemingly naive or even innocent forms. His “grab into a cupboard full of toy instruments” – apart from slide whistles, there are also plastic tubes and toy saxophones – not only has a humorous function but also a function involving motifs and harmony. “I actually just wanted to write a symphonic humoresque but then it ended up with the full dimensions of a symphony”,

Fourth Symphonie by Gustav Mahler

Gustav Mahler Konzert zum Nationalfeiertag

Gustav Mahler wrote to his friend Natalie Bauer-Lechner in the summer of 1900 about the recently completed Fourth Symphony. Furthermore, after the Second Symphony and the Third Symphony, the self-contained cycle of the Magic Horn Symphonies had now been completed. These bear witness to the close connection created by Mahler between the symphony and the song, as each of these symphonies also contains songs. The respective texts, as is so often the case with Mahler, are from the collection of poems “Des Knaben Wunderhorn [The Boy’s Magic Horn]” by Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano. For the Fourth Symphony, Mahler used, inter alia, “Das himmlische Leben [The Heavenly Life]”, set as an orchestral song earlier in 1892, and which he had designated as a “Humoresque”. Inspired by this term, newly emerged in German linguistic usage, he reflected as follows: “Everything is placed on its head, causality has no validity at all! It is as if you suddenly looked at the side of the Moon that is turned away from us!” However, this completely reversed world not only forms the starting point for this composition but is also integrated into the final movement. There, the heavenly paradise promised by the child waits on you with screaming animals and ironic overtones.

Concerts
Miah Person (c) Mina Artistbilder
Wiener Konzerthaus, Great Hall
Gardner, Persson, Gruber / Gruber, Mahler
Miah Person (c) Mina Artistbilder
Wiener Konzerthaus, Great Hall
Gardner, Persson, Gruber / Gruber, Mahler