HK Gruber on Kurt Weill and more

HK Gruber has joined Presto to talk about the new release of a fine new album, Dancing On A Volcano, made on tour with Ensemble Modern for the ensemble’s own label. Covering music written between 1920 and 1933, It is the latest in an extensive list of collaborations between the Austrian composer/conductor/chansonnier and the group with which he is closes. Naturally, the composer closest to Gruber’s heart – Kurt Weill – is included.

The album’s title reflects the volatile political climate of Germany in that time, and listening to its sharply rendered performances brings a timely reminder of just how relevant and forward looking its music continues to sound today. Gruber, an ebullient and charming presence throughout our interview, picks up on that straight away.

“That was the goal of our programme. When Carnegie Hall invited us to their festival the subject was Weimar Republic and the fragility of democracy, and they asked us for a programme for this time. I knew instantly it should be from the time between 1918 and 1933. In 1918 there was Korngold composing his incidental music for Much Ado About Nothing, for a small ensemble, and first performed in 1920. The world premiere was in the Schönbrunn Theatre, with Max Reinhardt as the stage director. Korngold managed to make a small orchestra of probably eighteen members sound like a large symphony orchestra.”

Gruber then chose two key compositional influences, and one key work of the time. “We included Hindemith’s Kammermusik No. 1 from 1921, then Schoenberg’s Begleitungsmusik zu einer Lichtspielscene ('Accompaniment To A Film Scene') from 1927, and Kurt Weill’s The Seven Deadly Sins, which marked the exact end of Weimar Republic in 1933, when the Nazis took power. Weill had to escape to Paris, so he left Berlin after he got a message that if he stayed, he would be in danger and put in a concentration camp. He travelled to Paris with only two bags and a few scores, and no money in his pocket – because the Jewish accounts were frozen. He went to Paris together with Caspar Neher, his stage designer, and was in Paris for two years. In 1935 he left because he wanted to watch a rehearsal in New York for The Eternal Road. Then he discovered that on Broadway there were a lot of theatres and decided not to go back to Europe but stay in New York, to be more or less a musical composer. He changed his musical language and became one of the leading composers on Broadway.”

Gruber has worked with the Ensemble Modern for many years. “We have known each other since 1984”, he says with a smile, “when we did a university tour, where we already had Weill in the programme – the suite from The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny. We had a piece of Maurizio Kagel, ‘Pas de Cinq’, and my bestseller, Frankenstein!!. When I heard them playing the suite of Mahagonny, I had the impression that with this ensemble I could start a kind of rediscovery of Kurt Weill.”

He recalls his own epiphany with the composer. “Since he left Europe, Weill was completely forgotten, and when I was twenty, in 1963, the only thing I knew was ‘Mack The Knife’. Just by accident I discovered in a record shop that he composed symphonic music, and step by step I uncovered a composer who was completely unknown in Germany and Austria. I then discovered him as an opera composer, and my most important discovery was a record of The Rise and Fall conducted by Wilhelm Brückner-Rüggeberg. In this production Lotte Lenya sang the part of Jenny, and it was one of the first opera performances in which I understood each word by the singers, and it was the reason for me to find out about Bertolt Brecht. From this day on I began to discover a continent which was for me called Brecht-Weill!”

The musicians of Ensemble Modern were on board. “We produced our very first CD in 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell, called Berlin im Licht, for Largo. On this disc you hear the ‘Berlin Im Licht’ song, which I sang, and we reconstructed the first movement of the suite. We included the songs ‘Frauentanz’, and ‘Öl-musik’, and from this moment discovered Weill more and more, producing The Threepenny Opera in 1994, and then the Mahagonny. Ein Songspiel.”

Yet the Korngold is arguably the standout piece on the album, as Gruber smiles. “You would not know that this is an ensemble that mostly plays avant garde music, or ‘plinky plonky’, as you might call it! They play like the best philharmonic ensemble in the world. It was for me a very memorable thing - such as the cello solo in the second movement (played by Eva Böcker) - it is ‘Yo-Yo Ma-issimo’! It was absolutely fantastic.”

Gruber’s passion for Weill’s music is immediately evident, however. “When I rediscovered scores by him, it was clear that the melodies are for all listeners, but the secret in the music is to discover the quality of the inner voices. If you organise them perfectly, and precisely, the symphonic quality comes out much better than just concentrating on the melody. He is a composer of melody, but the rare quality of composers in these days was mostly in light music. Kurt Weill was a real symphonic composer and used his gift of organising complexity in a kind of simplicity when he composed simple songs.

I discovered this, step by step, during my cooperation with Ensemble Modern, but I will have the pleasure very soon – in October – of realising a project which I suggested with the orchestra, which was a complete recording of The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny. This was unfortunately too expensive for them to organise, but when the COVID time began it was when the Gewandhaus Orchestra made me their Composer in Residence. I began to cooperate with them and one day their concert manager suggested this to me, and opened doors. This October we are making two live recordings of the whole opera, to come out as an album.”

Gruber has similarly explored Weill and Eisler with the Gewandhaus orchestra. “I discovered that they play very effectively, similar to Ensemble Modern. For me it was always a very big thing that I wanted to make good what the Nazis had made bad to Kurt Weill. I developed my life in the direction of a so-called ‘Weill specialist’, but I’m not a specialist so much – I just love his music. That’s my speciality!”

Gruber conducts his own music, too – including a recent release on Capriccio of his Piano Concerto, with soloist Frank Dupree. The melodic inner voices identified in Weill’s music are at play here too, but in a piece of remarkable density. “The Piano Concerto uses a few minutes of a theme from my opera Geschichten aus dem Wiener Wald, a nightclub scene. The character Marianne is seen by her father, who is surprised to see his daughter dancing in a nightclub, and she asks him why he never answered her letters. In the background a little dance band is playing shimmies and foxtrots, and I used this music as the main material for the Piano Concerto.”

The concerto was originally commissioned by Emmanuel Ax, but the young pianist Frank Dupree went to see Gruber to proclaim his love for the piece. “He took masterclasses with Manny”, says Gruber, “and two years ago I had a concert with the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra, and they offered me recording sessions. Frank sent the CD to Manny, and he was incredibly happy to hear ‘his’ piece played by a youngster. I collaborate with Frank with great pleasure.”

Gruber enjoys a productive relationship with Capriccio, who have also released several landmark Weill recordings. “They produced a double CD with me on which you hear Eisler with Klangforum Wien, and I also produced for them an album of Gottfried von Einem’s opera Der Prozess, a work premiered in 1953. I wanted to produce it because it was a very advanced undertaking by a man who was one of my teachers – my last teacher in fact. In this opera the singers have nothing to sing, they are speaking the text like percussion players. If they are not absolutely precise, they are overlaid by the orchestra, who are also playing like percussion players. The piece is organised for an orchestra which is playing musical patterns, and the text has to be done mechanically with no ‘bel canto’ influence.”

The composer’s initial frustrations with performing the piece were overcome. “Gottfried once told me that this piece never worked, but I received an e-mail from the Salzburg Festival announcing that I was performing the opera in August 2018! I made the casting and it was recorded, and what you can hear is a combination of studio and orchestra. I had fantastic singers, absolutely precise, and we won two awards for that album. This year in July, again for Capriccio, I am producing my own Frankenstein!! and Northwind Pictures.” He rolls the ‘r’ on 'Frankenstein' with great relish, before saying, “I am very glad to cooperate with Capriccio, we have a very good relationship.”

Perhaps inevitably we turn back to Weill, to discuss the The Seven Deadly Sins further. For Gruber has recorded them with Irish-Canadian mezzo-soprano Wallis Giunta, once for the Ensemble Modern in German but also in their English translation with the Swedish Chamber Orchestra for BIS, part of an album including the Concerto for Violin and Wind Orchestra and ‘The New Orpheus’. “She is sensational”, enthuses Gruber of his singer. “I remember when I made the ensemble version of The Seven Deadly Sins, the version on the Ensemble Modern CD. I began to make it after a Threepenny performance at the Salzburg festival. Kim Kowalke, of the Kurt Weill Foundation, said, “It is very important that Seven Deadly Sins gets an arrangement for small ensemble, to stop bad and silly arrangements”. Together with Christian Muthspiel, a horn player and composer, I made a completely new scoring for fifteen instruments, which we produced with Ensemble Modern.”

Of Giunta, Gruber says, “I coached her in German – but it was not absolutely necessary, because she speaks fantastic ‘Brechtian’. You can cut the grass with her rolling ‘r’s! She is the ideal singer, and when we had to produce the orchestral version in the English translation by W.H. Auden, I knew English was her mother tongue, so we did that with the Swedish Chamber Orchestra. She is my most important Weill singer, and I have suggested her for the role of Widow Begbick in our big Mahagonny production in October.”

The BIS album contains an intriguing rarity, The New Orpheus, a rarely heard cantata for soprano, violin and orchestra that appears at an important crossroads in Weill’s output. “He composed it before he met Bertolt Brecht”, explains Gruber. “Weill was a pupil of Busoni, and his very first symphonic compositions like the Violin Concerto and First Symphony were written while studying with him. I have recorded the symphonies with the Swedish Chamber Orchestra (an earlier album for BIS), who by the way are a fantastic orchestra, up with Ensemble Modern as perfectionists! I have collaborated with them since 1996, and we still have plans and projects we are discussing.”

“The First Symphony is a very early piece, on the border of atonality”, he explains further, “and The New Orpheus is also of this kind of writing. The tonality is not quite sure from The Threepenny Opera onwards, so I was extremely interested to work out the detail in this piece. I had never heard a convincing performance and was very pleased we could work on it. It is a good combination to hear the early and later Weill on this album, because there is a big development between The New Orpheus and the absolutely tonal language which he had in The Seven Deadly Sins.

Though 83, Gruber continues with a busy schedule, and the flurry of conducting activity complements his continued endeavours as a composer. “I have had a lot of cooperation with the pianist Kirill Gerstein”, he says, “and around 2021 I had an invitation to the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, from Marc Neikrug, who invited me to make an ensemble version of Frankenstein!! The Santa Fe Opera developed a way of presenting so I could sing my repertoire in German, and the audience could read the translation in real time above our heads. Kirill was our piano player, and he was so impressed by the repertoire that he thought of me when he was presented as artist in residence. I am writing a cycle for him for piano and orchestra, a series of dances with material from the good old Roaring Twenties, without taking real things from that period. It is quotations without imitation, but with dancing. It is not a volcano, but very hot ground on which we are dancing!”