Connections between the great Viennese tradition and Fred Astaire seem to be few and far between, but in HK Gruber's Dancing in the Dark, this unlikely fusion is just one of a dizzying cavalcade of musical contrasts. The work was given its UK premiere in Prom 20 by the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by the composer, on the back of its world premiere performances in Vienna, when Simon Rattle conducted the Vienna Philharmonic. Here, Gruber's infectious conducting style, which saw him dancing around the podium at times, gave the BBCPO players an almost Viennese sense of luxurious abandon.
The title is taken from a Fred Astaire song, one of the inspirations behind the hedonistic dance of the second movement. The piece begins, however, in a vein of nostalgic reflection. Gruber's opulent orchestration pays homage to the late-Romantic excesses of Mahler and Strauss, with vast percussion and brass sections. The opening movement begins with long, searching lines scored for the 19th-century exotica of tenor horns and Wagner tubas, but is interrupted by fragments of a wild, dissonant dance. Gradually, the violence of the dance wins out over the slower music.
At the Albert Hall, the movement's climax had a tragic power, culminating with a lone percussionist hitting a huge box with two enormous drumsticks, like a grotesque parody of the snare-drum part in a 1940s swing track. The momentum cascaded into the second movement, a chaotic, multilayered dance. There was a dark energy in the complexity and density of this music. It ended with a high unison for strings, played with terrifying power by the BBCPO string section, as if the energy of both movements had collapsed into this single point of blinding brilliance.
Despite its hyperactive orchestration and overabundant musical references, Gruber's piece had a clear and comprehensible architecture. However, in the previous night's Prom, Erkki-Sven Tuur's Violin Concerto did not sustain its ambitious, large-scale structure. The piece mixes elements of minimalism, such as endlessly repeated arpeggios, with atonal harmonies and melodies, and it attempts to create an abstract drama from this combination of languages. Even in a performance as committed as Isabelle van Keulen's, with the BBCPO conducted by Paavo Jarvi, it sounded overblown, as if the grandiosity of its gestures was not connected to a convincing musical argument.
