In Thursday’s (2/12) Daily Telegraph (London), Geoffry Norris notes H K Gruber’s enthusiasm over becoming the BBC Philharmonic’s composer/conductor. “Ideas about what he can do when takes over from James MacMillan in the autumn at the BBC’s Manchester base tumble from his lips. Projects with children, neglected composers, open rehearsals, recordings, composer portraits, encouraging composers to conduct their own works: as he says, he has enough plans to last him for the next 40 years.” Gruber’s most famous work, Frankenstein!!!, “was sparked by the anti-authoritarian student movement in Austria in the late Sixties, when Gruber was in his mid-twenties, and uses children’s rhymes by H C Artmann that conceal political statements and which Gruber weaves into a fantasy of anarchy. ‘We wanted to say no to the dictators of Darmstadt,’ he booms, referring to the hard-line group of atonal composers who dominated musical thinking in Germany and beyond after the Second World War. … ‘I don’t see my function,’ says Gruber, ‘as being somebody who just takes care of his own music. I am a composer/conductor, and I am very interested in the music of colleagues—dead or alive, it doesn’t matter.’ ”
