Editorial Board


North American Editor:
(USA and Canada)
Marc Bridle


London Editor:
(London UK)

Melanie Eskenazi

Regional Editor:
(UK regions and Europe)
Bill Kenny

 

Webmaster: Len Mullenger

 

 

                    

Google

WWW MusicWeb


Search Music Web with FreeFind




Any Review or Article


 

 

Seen and Heard Promenade Concert Review

 


PROM 52:  Gruber, Weill, Eisler, Daniel Norman (tenor), Daniel Hyde (organ), BBC Singers, BBC Symphony Orchestra, H K Gruber, (conductor/chansonnier), Royal Albert Hall, 22.8.06 (AO)

 

 

You couldn't invent someone like HK Gruber.  Nothing, I suspect, pleases him more than discomforting the pretentious.   He shakes up complacency.  If he goes way over the top, so be it: the challenge is what matters, not easy answers. I love the motto  "Life is too important to be taken seriously".  It could certainly be Grubers, because under the mayhem, there's purpose.   He revives a Viennese activist tradition that used inventive, anarchic satire to make a point.

This was the UK première of his latest work, Hidden Agenda, given its first hearing a few days ago in Lucerne. It started as fairly straightforward tonal music, but soon a veneer of chaos smeared over it, bending the notes as far as they could stretch.   Lush romanticism, subverted, yes, but not quite what I'd expected of Gruber.  Maybe he's proving yet again that you can't take him for granted.

The BBC programme called this Prom  "A night of musical subversion". Perhaps, then, Weill's Kiddush (1946) subverts the liturgical character of the prayer by inserting elaborations from jazz and Hollywood?  The Albert Hall organ played passages that sounded like good old fashioned Wurlitzer.  Perhaps there's a reason for this but it still escapes me.  

 

Hanns Eisler's setting of Brecht's Liturgie vom Hauch is clearer in üintent.   The poem is unyieldingly didactic.   Even its ironic quote from Goethe "Über allen Gipfeln ist Ruh" wears thin repeated again and again.  Eisler varies the refrain the quote appears in.  At first it's set lyrically to balance the staccato death march of the first verse.  Later it's screamed violently by the male voices. The BBC singers  were able to evoke the sound so close to a broadcast of a Hitler rant, which chilled far more than the fairly obvious text. Both Eisler and Weill have set Zu Potsdam unter dem Eichen, and here we had Weill's version.  It is far better known in its solo voice setting because solo voice gives more room for individual interpretation.  The BBC Singers are perhaps "too" good for this kind of street fighting militancy.  The poem may depict a funeral but it's also an intense anti war protest.   The combination of slower tempo and beautifully balanced, trained voices dimmed the impact.

Eisler's Ferner Streiken: 50,000 Holzarbeiten was rather more successful, as the stronger writing propelled the interpretation forward.  Brecht relentlessly repeats "Fünfzig tausend….fünfzig tausend": the lines organically  evolve into a march.   What makes the song really interesting, however, is the way Eisler varies the line, especially in the second verse, making it far more interesting as music.  The choir also caught the subtle, but important change of emphasis to   "Rucksack" and "Pritschen" at the end.  This had an emotional effect, as the composer intended.  The Proms audience went wild with applause.

The most important reason for attending this Prom was Gruber's Frankenstein!!   It is an event, a piece of theatre as much as of music.  It needs to be experienced live.  One day Gruber will be too old to create the spectacle afresh, and it will exist only in memory.  This was a special occasion..    Frankenstein!!  was first performed nearly thirty years ago,  but is still fresh and vivid.  The Frankenstein story epitomizes the morbid "gothic" seam of Romanticism.  Horror movies celebrate it and parody it at the same time.   Gruber's Frankenstein!!  parodies the entire genre and throws in Robinson Crusoe,  Goldfinger and John Wayne for good measure.   Images flash past so quickly they barely register, but that's part of the effect, which Gruber calls pan- demonium, at once referring to the anarchy of Pan worship and to demonology.   There are snatches of oompah band and of lullaby, an elegant horn solo that wouldn't be out of place in a "proper" symphony, and, in true Gruber style, lots of toy instruments and whirring noise tubes.    He conducts, sings and plays at the same time, of course.  Frantic energy is part of the package.  It wouldn't be quite so manic without tiny, tinny saxophone or good old fashioned alto Melodica (bright red, of course). This performance was in English, which made it even more surreal.  He murders syntax and distorts lines still further. Howls and screams seem quite mundane. He affected an extremely heavy accent, exaggerating the kitsch mitteleuropean ambience so typical of Frankenstein movies.  Think Bela Lugosi on speed, performed by Brahms, whom Gruber vaguely resembles.   (I'd love to see Knussen try this piece!)

This madcap romp through images is hilarious, but there's, disciplined method behind it.  Rhythms and counter rhythms cross and converge.  As with the horn solo, there is nice intricate scoring for percussion.   Random as the images may seem, cumulatively they have an effect.  The orchestration is tight and spare.  Lurking behind the humour there's something dark.  "Frankenstein is dancing…with the test tube lady…my daughter dear, it's you!"  Batman and Robin in bed together… well, Batman 's "ill bred".  Crusoe visits a new island where cannibals live… And a little girl visits a doctor to fix her doll Caspar.  "Good medicine is practiced here, with minor aberrations."  So Caspar gets the brain of a criminal.  "Thank you, thank you" croons Gruber in falsetto.  "Now my Caspar can walk again...and chase pretty little girls".

The programme will be broadcast for a week on the BBC's Listen Again facility.  Whether it will capture the intensity of the live performance, I don't know.  But I'd certainly recommend Gruber's recording "Roaring Eisler", where he sings the better-known Eisler militant songs.  Ernst Busch, Eisler's friend and comrade, sang them with intense conviction.  But Busch lived them - he endured ten years in Nazi concentration camps for his beliefs.  No modern singer has that background.  Gruber comes surprisingly close, though.

 

 

Incidentally, Gruber is a distant descendant of the Gruber who wrote "Silent Night, Holy Night.    Make of that what you will!

 

 

Anne Ozorio

 


 



Back to the Top     Back to the Index Page


 





   

 

 

 
Error processing SSI file

 

Error processing SSI file