HK Gruber

Heinz Karl Gruber sustains concurrent roles as conductor, composer, and singer, the last of which he designates with the term chansonnier. Extensive performances and recordings have centered on the music of Kurt Weill and Hanns Eisler. Traces of their approach, together with that of Alban Berg, Igor Stravinsky, and assorted pop and cabaret idioms, surface in his own output, tempered by a generous measure of his personal wit.

Born in Vienna on January 3, 1943, and known among friends as “Nali,” Gruber participated in the Vienna Boys’ Choir from 1954 to 1957. Several years at the Vienna Hochschule für Musik followed, encompassing instruction in composition, theory, double bass, French horn, electronic music, film music, and dance. In his final year there, 1963, he attended composition master classes given by Gottfried von Einem and pursued private lessons with him for an additional year.

Gruber entered the ensemble Die Reihe as a double bassist in 1961 and later assumed its artistic directorship. His initial work as actor and singer began in 1966, an activity that gained steadily in prominence. Regular appearances in that capacity took place with MOB art and tone ART, the group he co-founded in 1968 with Kurt Schwertsik and Otto Zykan. Between 1969 and 1998 he played bass in the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra.

Conducting and composition proceeded without interruption. Serial procedures mark many of his early scores, among them the Four Pieces for violin and piano of 1963. The melodrama Die Vertreibung aus dem Paradies, completed in 1966, unites a predominantly dissonant language with clear references to cabaret and theater music. Far more widely known is the pan-demonium Frankenstein!!, an audacious and darkly comical setting for baritone chansonnier and orchestra of children’s verses by the Viennese poet H.C. Artmann. The work originated as the Frankenstein-Suite of 1970; Gruber recast it in 1976-1977 as a continuous cycle that has received hundreds of performances worldwide in concert, staged, film, and television versions. Subsequent concertos established him further, written for Ernst Kovacic, Yo-Yo Ma, and Hakan Hardenberger.

Since 1997 Gruber has maintained composing alongside conducting and chansonnier appearances. A sustained association connects him with the Frankfurt-based Ensemble Modern, while frequent engagements involve the London Sinfonietta, Swedish Chamber Orchestra, and numerous other ensembles. His recordings include the RCA/BMG compact disc Charming Weill, which presents dance band arrangements of Kurt Weill songs and earned a Deutschen Schallplattenkritik award in 2001.

As a singer Gruber frequently performs his own music and has focused on the songs of Weill and Hanns Eisler as well as technically demanding scores such as Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire and Peter Maxwell Davies’s Eight Songs for a Mad King. From 2009 until 2015 he served as composer/conductor of the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra. Among later works are the opera Geschichten aus dem Wiener Wald, composed 2011-2014 after the play by Ödön von Horváth, and a Piano Concerto written 2014-2016 on commission from the New York Philharmonic for Emanuel Ax; Alan Gilbert conducted the Philharmonic and Ax at the 2017 premiere.