HK Gruber: Short Stories from the Vienna Woods album review – still quirky after all these years

2026-02-20 - 07:13

Dupree/Orf Vienna RSO/Gruber (Capriccio) This collection of the 83-year-old composer’s larger-scale works highlights his inventive and restless writing At 83, Austrian iconoclast HK Gruber shows no sign of losing his anarchic edge nor indeed his ability to entertain. This eclectic album includes his significant piano concerto, premiered by Emanuel Ax with the New York Philharmonic in 2017, and an absurdist potpourri extracted from his 2014 opera Tales from the Vienna Woods, both conducted by the composer himself. Quintessentially Gruber, the 25-minute concerto opens in high anxiety, plunging into a twitchy, noirish landscape full of fragmented, Schoenbergian melodies before emerging into a blues-inflected daylight. This is music with ants in its pants, carried off in style by Frank Dupree whose jazz experience stands him in good stead here. Continue reading...