HK Gruber: new clarinet concerto dances FINTango
The newest work by HK Gruber is a clarinet concerto premiered at the Carinthian Summer Festival by Sharon Kam on 5 July, exploring the defiant genre of Finnish tango.
HK Gruber conducts the world premiere of his new clarinet concerto FINTango at the Carinthian Summer Festival in Villach’s Congress Center on 5 July. Sharon Kam is soloist with the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra (RSO Wien) in a programme opening the festival, also featuring Gruber’s Frankenstein!! with Georg Nigl as chansonnier.
The new concerto grew from Gruber working with the AVANTI! Chamber Orchestra in Finland in 2021. The orchestra’s artistic director Kari Kriikku invited Gruber to write a clarinet concerto and, though Kriikku had to sadly withdraw from playing the work due to health reasons, Gruber had in the meantime discovered the genre of Finnish tango and the central dancing focus for the work was determined. The resulting 25-minute concerto is a commission between the Carinthian Summer Festival, the RSO Wien and the Swedish Chamber Orchestra.
HK Gruber explains how “around 1900, the tango was imported from Argentina to Finland, at a time when Finland was occupied by the Russians. The Finns derived a way of expressing resistance through body language employing the movement vocabulary of tango. They couldn’t risk singing defiant lyrics, as that would have been life-threatening. Thus, during the occupation, tango remained purely instrumental music, textless, abstract and intended to express a particular attitude. To this day, there are special tango dance platforms scattered over Finland, even in the cities, and tango is still a deadly serious matter, with bandoneon players lurking around every corner.”
“I sympathized with this tradition and began to write Finnish tangos for clarinet and orchestra. These were fictitious tangos, created without me undertaking any folklore research, tangos that add something to the idea of resistance in the Finnish tradition from my perspective as a musician. The result is a kind of artificial folklore, reminiscent of the late Ligeti with his artificial Hungarian folk music, exemplified by his Sippal, Dobbal, Nádihegedüvel (With Pipes, Drums, Fiddles), or my Frankenstein!! exploring H.C. Artmann’s invented continents. An alternative subtitle for FINTango would be: what you can’t (or aren’t allowed to) talk about, you have to dance about…”
> Visit the Carinthian Summer Festival website
Autumn performances of Gruber’s music include Håkan Hardenberger as trumpet soloist in Aerial, featured by the Stavanger Symphony Orchestra in September and by the Tonkünstler Orchestra in Grafenegg, Vienna and St Pölten in October. The first recording of Gruber’s Piano Concerto is due for release later this year with soloist Frank Dupree and the RSO Wien on the Capriccio label
Frankenstein!! is 50 in 2028
Looking further ahead, 25 November 2028 is the 50th anniversary of the first performance of Frankenstein!! conducted by the young Simon Rattle. Building upon an earlier suite, Gruber composed Frankenstein!! in the orchestral version we know today, which was premiered in 1978 with Gruber as chansonnier alongside Rattle at the helm of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra. An ensemble version for 12 players plus chansonnier was unveiled the following year by Die Reihe in Berlin, making the score also available for smaller forces. Across its half century, Gruber’s work has enjoyed over 700 performances around the world and is firmly established as one of the most popular of all contemporary works.
> Further information on Work: FINTango
Photo: Jon Super