Bridgewater Hall, Manchester
HK Gruber has no great fondness for sauerkraut, to which the BBC Philharmonic's composer/conductor compares the hardline modernism of 20th-century music. A radio broadcast of Gottfried von Einem's Concerto for Orchestra proved to be a turning point. As Gruber remembers it: "For the first time I heard a modern composer who wasn't writing sauerkraut music."
Von Einem's contemporary piece blurred the boundary between an orchestra and a swing band. The finale incorporated jazzy syncopations picked up from foreign radio stations that earned the composer censure from the Nazi regime. Gruber directed the work with the evangelistic zeal of a man extolling his musical credo; and prefaced it with his own musical tribute to his former teacher, the 2nd Violin Concerto, entitled Nebelsteinmusik after the Austrian mountain where Von Einem lived.
The concept for this piece – which interleaves a passage from Alban Berg's Lyric Suite with material derived from an anagram of Von Einem's name – had more than a whiff of sauerkraut about it. Yet Gruber has an unparalleled ability to make the most intractable methods sound instantly accessible: the singing tone of soloist Olivier Charlier's melodic line was ideally suited to Gruber's unique hybrid of heavyweight light music.
The first half of the concert also explored the continuation of musical fathers and sons: a transcendent account of Charles Ives's Three Places in New England was succeeded by John Adams's My Father Knew Charles Ives, a continuation of Ives's orchestral travelogue along the north Atlantic seaboard in which it was difficult to hear the join.