HK Gruber
Composer/Conductor
“As a conductor, Gruber is in his element when it comes to Weill's quintessential mix of Bach and ballroom, and his performance of Little Threepenny Music was louchely sensual and classically poised. The BBC Philharmonic's response to Gruber is tangibly enthusiastic: the partnership is off to a fine start.” The Guardian
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HK Gruber (credit: Lucerne Festival) |
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HK Gruber (credit: Lucerne Festival) |
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HK Gruber (credit: Lucerne Festival) |
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HK Gruber (credit: Lucerne Festival) |
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HK Gruber (credit: Priska Ketterer) |
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HK Gruber (credit: Georg Anderhub) |
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HK Gruber (credit: Priska Ketterer) |
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HK Gruber (credit: Georg Anderhub) |
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HK Gruber (credit: Georg Anderhub) |
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HK Gruber (credit: Johnny Volcano) |
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HK Gruber (credit: Johnny Volcano) |
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HK Gruber (credit: Johnny Volcano) |
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HK Gruber (credit: Johnny Volcano) |
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CLICK HERE to watch a film about HK Gruber as he prepares to take over as the BBC Philharmonic's new Composer/Conductor. With contributions from James MacMillan and exclusive rehearsal footage featuring works by both composers.
Press release
5 February 2009
HK Gruber announced as Composer/Conductor of the BBC Philharmonic from the 2009/10 season
HK Gruber is to succeed James MacMillan as the BBC Philharmonic’s next Composer/Conductor, starting in September 2009, with his Bridgewater Hall debut in this new role in February 2010. Gruber follows in the footsteps of the eminent Scottish composer James MacMillan who took up the post in September 2000. Before that Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, who is now Master of the Queen’s Music, held the title for ten years.
The position of Composer/Conductor will see Gruber conduct the BBC Philharmonic in two concert dates per season in its Bridgewater Hall series in Manchester, as well as recording his own music and that of others for Chandos Records. Forthcoming plans for Gruber and the BBC Philharmonic include the UK premiere of Busking , Gruber’s concerto for trumpet, accordion, banjo and string orchestra and a radio production of Weill’s Die Dreigroschenoper . Plans are also in progress for Gruber to conduct the Orchestra in his home city of Vienna, at the Wiener Konzerthaus.
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Listen to extracts of HK Gruber conducting the BBC Philharmonic in two of his own works, courtesy of Chandos Records
Gruber's famous pandemonium, Frankenstein!!, with the composer also as chansonnier
The climax of orchestral work, Dancing in the Dark
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Gruber will be involved in the BBC Philharmonic’s education work, specifically in the many varied communities of Salford which will be the Orchestra’s home from 2011, when the BBC’s new base in the North opens there at mediacity:uk. He will also work with composition students at the Royal Northern College of Music.
The BBC Philharmonic and Gruber have worked together many times before, with highlights including their recording of Frankenstein!! for Chandos in 2005, paired with Perpetuum Mobile , Charivari and Dancing in the Dark . The BBC Philharmonic also gave the UK premiere of Dancing in the Dark at the BBC Proms in 2003.
Commenting on the appointment Richard Wigley, General Manager of the BBC Philharmonic says: “Gruber combines a wonderful rapport with the BBC Philharmonic with a strong commitment to living and neglected twentieth century composers. We are delighted that this towering musician is joining us. The relationship with James MacMillan (and with Sir Peter Maxwell Davies before him) has been very special for the Orchestra. Manchester, not to mention the wider orchestral world, is in for a terrific journey with Gruber and the BBC Philharmonic in the coming years.”
Gruber himself adds: “Everybody dreams from time to time that a fairy godmother will come and offer you a Rolls Royce. For me, I am absolutely happy that the BBC Philharmonic is now my Rolls Royce. The possibilities are limitless and I’m sure we will make many musical discoveries together in the coming years.”
Click on the link below to listen to the February edition of the Intermusica podcast. Both HK Gruber and the BBC Philharmonic's General Manager, Richard Wigley, talk to Sandy Burnett about his new Composer/Conductor position:
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Viennese composer, conductor and chansonnier HK Gruber is one of the contemporary music world’s larger-than-life and well-loved figures. Composing in his own highly individual style, his music reflects the great Viennese tradition, both classical and popular, through a contemporary lens, drawing inspiration from Stravinsky, Berg, Kurt Weill, jazz and cabaret, combining rhapsodic textures with a twist of irreverent black humour.
Born in 1943, HK Gruber (or Nali as he is affectionately known) is the composer of the iconic and celebrated work Frankenstein!!, which was premiered in Liverpool in 1978 under a young Sir Simon Rattle and has gone on to receive hundreds of acclaimed performances worldwide. Among Gruber’s other compositions are two violin concertos, a cello concerto, percussion concerto Rough Music , two trumpet concerti written for Håkan Hardenberger and orchestral works Dancing in the Dark , which was commissioned and premiered by the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra and Sir Simon Rattle in 2003, and Hidden Agenda , which was premiered at the Lucerne Festival where Gruber was Composer-in Residence in 2006. His dramatic works include the opera Der Herr Nordwind which premiered at Zurich Opera in 2005, conducted by Gruber.
Gruber conducts some of the world’s most prestigious orchestras, including the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchester, WDR Sinfonie Orchester Köln, Cleveland Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic and Baltimore Symphony. In October 2008 he conducted the Vienna Philharmonic for the second time as part of a season-long residency at the Vienna Konzerthaus. The residency also includes a concert performance of Weill’s Die Dreigroschenoper conducted by Gruber, with Klangforum Wien and a cast including Ian Bostridge, Dorothea Roeschmann and Angelika Kirschlager, with further performances at London’s Barbican Centre and the Theatre des Champs-Elysées in Paris.
HK Gruber: a composer who refuses to be bound by rules
On his appointment as the BBC Philharmonic's new composer/conductor, HK Gruber discusses possibilities without boundaries.
Geoffery Norris, The Telegraph
11 February 2009
To say that HK Gruber is enthusiastic about becoming the BBC Philharmonic's composer/conductor is rather like asserting that a cat is quite fond of cream.
Ideas about what he can do when he takes over from James MacMillan in the autumn tumble from his lips. Projects with children, neglected composers, workshops, open rehearsals, recordings, composer portraits, commissioning new pieces, collaborations with the Royal Northern College of Music, encouraging composers to conduct their own works.
As he says, he has enough plans to last him for the next 40 years.
No wonder the BBC Philharmonic chose this ebullient all-rounder with the hearty laugh to spearhead its continuing programme of introducing new and unfamiliar music to wider audiences.
Not only is he a composer and conductor but also a chansonnier, with one of those deep, gravelly voices that smack of cabaret and belong to a tradition made famous by his fellow-Austrian, Lotte Lenya.
His most celebrated and most performed work is the iconoclastic "Frankenstein!!!", which he composed 30 years ago and is still conducting and singing.
"I perform it with many orchestras in the world", he says, "and every time it's new and fresh because generally the orchestras are playing it for the first time."
Simon Rattle gave the première in Liverpool in 1978, since when there has scarcely been a period when "Frankenstein!!!" has not been in preparation somewhere in the globe, most recently even entering the hallowed portals of the Vienna Philharmonic.
It is unquestionably the work that made Gruber's name, identifying a composer who refuses to be bound by rules. It was sparked by the anti-authoritarian student movement in Austria in the late 1960s, when Gruber was in his mid 20s, and uses children's rhymes by H C Artmann that conceal political statements and which Gruber weaves into a fantasy of anarchy.
"We wanted to say no to the dictators of Darmstadt", he booms, referring to the hard-line group of atonal composers who wielded dominance over musical thinking in Germany and beyond after the Second World War.
"If somebody wanted to dictate to me as a young composer what I could write, I'd say I could make my own decisions and wanted to go back – or forward, as I like to think – to the tonal idiom, because the possibilities are without any boundaries."
This policy has certainly done Gruber no harm, and his popularity is now at an all-time high. Nobody calls him H K or even Heinz Karl. He is universally known as Nali, stemming from a nickname he had as a child singing in the Vienna Boys' Choir.
He officially takes over his Manchester job in September, but before that directs the BBC Philharmonic in a studio recording of Kurt Weill's "Threepenny Opera", echoing his first collaboration with the orchestra in 2000 in performances of Weill's "Mahagonny".
"I had the impression", he says, "that this was my orchestra, that this was my dream."
Now the dream is reality, and Gruber can pursue at least some of those schemes that were thrashed out between him and the orchestral management in a brainstorming session in Austria some while ago.
"We worked for three days from very early morning till the very last minute of the day. We walked, drank and ate. Good meal, good drinking, good walk, good ideas."
"I don't see my function", says Gruber, "as being somebody who just takes care of his own music. I am a composer/conductor, and I am very interested in the music of colleagues – dead or alive, it doesn't matter."
James MacMillan's music will feature in a "friendly handover concert", a shared evening in which MacMillan will conduct Gruber's "Time Shadow" (again with a text by Artmann which Gruber will sing in English for the first time) and Gruber conducts one of MacMillan's pieces.
"Jimmy", he says, "is for me one of the most important composers. I really like his music. I'm a great fan of his organ concerto 'A Scotch Bestiary'. What fantastic music."
There will be a composer portrait of Kurt Schwertsik, the Austrian composer who studied with Stockhausen but who, like Gruber, rebelled against the dogma of atonalism.
He will champion the music of his old teacher Gottfried von Einem, and that of Hanns Eisler, the German-born composer of Austrian descent who studied with Schoenberg, worked with Bertolt Brecht and in later life wrote many film scores.
The neglected English composer Walter Leigh, young Austrian creative talents such as Christian Muthspiel, the Russian-born Igor Markevich, whom Gruber thinks of as the "missing link between Prokofiev and Stravinsky" – all these and many more are on Gruber's list of must-dos, with an aim one day of taking the BBC Philharmonic to Vienna to play Austrian music to home audiences.
Manchester is in for an ear-opening and exhilarating time with Gruber. As he says with a mighty guffaw, "concert life is all the richer because of composer/conductors".
For further information:
» BBC Philharmonic
» Boosey & Hawkes
Contact:
Hannah Waddell
T: +44 20 7239 0158
E: hwaddell@intermusica.co.uk
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