Even if your Vienna is not pre-eminently the city of Johann Strauss and Sigmund Freud, the music on these discs could well provide an appealing alternative to the weighter Beethoven, Brahms and Mahler. It is music dominated by dance rhythms which is also intensely analytical in its response to models which range from the (Viennese) high art of Mahler and Berg to a cabaret style stemming from Satie and Weill. What makes it all impeccably post-modern is that there is absolutely no tension between old and new, highbrow and popular in these three composers. But that doesn't mean that all the works are equally successful.
The Gruber disc is the most thought-provoking, tracing the composer's development from the Four Pieces for solo violin and the Six Episodes for piano, of the mid-1960s, to the Violin Concerto, completed in 1978 and revised in 1992. In the early works there are strengths—gradually evolving, subtly-contoured lines, distinctive motives—which the concerto, over its much greater length, seems determined to disown. The result is, for me, an oddity, a work that is easygoing in attitude yet relentlessly consistent in its concern for the moment at the expense of the longer term. It might grow on one with time, yet most of Gruber's work, as well as the pieces by Cerha and Schwertsik recorded here, have immediate appeal and make an immediate effect.
Cerha's 'songs of a sort' bring us Gruber as chansonnier, introducing and performing two sets of short pieces whose throwaway style puts their often serious content into sharp relief. The songs to texts by Gerhard Ruhm and Cerha himself move onto environmental themes, while Ernst Jandl's verse is more explicitly political. All are splendidly terse and sardonic, even though the live Purcell Room ambience makes it difficult to avoid an element of cosiness in the presentation. Some listeners may regret the inclusion on this disc of poems, spoken by Ruhm and Artmann, whose texts (when these take conventional verbal form) are not included in the booklet. But even when heard as sound alone, these serve to enhance the atmosphere created by the chansons themselves.
The songs of Kurt Schwertsik contrast strikingly with Cerha's, in that texts and music tend away from cabaret-style treatment of political and social issues towards the traditional concerns of Lieder—love and death. Even here, however, some of the texts (especially Jandl's) play with words, and Schwertsik's music responds by playing with harmonic and melodic patterns that often seem haunted by the rich Lied tradition. Schwertsik's achievement, which is perhaps most clearly evident here in the recent Three Late Lovesongs for cello and piano, is to convey this hauntedness, this only-partly-successful striving to remember 'real' nineteenth-century music, without at the same time creating modernist tensions: his language is too well integrated for that, his forms straightforward yet never simplistic, still less 'minimalist'.
The singer Christa Schwertsik brings an ideal blend of artfulness and directness to these pieces. In fact, all the performances on these discs are winningly convincing, and while the Maida Vale recordings on the Gruber CD seem a little too dry and narrow in perspective for such evocative music, the Schwertsik disc, recorded at Rosslyn Hill Chapel, and the live Purcell Room concert, both have excellent sound. The documentation is copious, with much useful background information and illuminating analysis. Whether or not this third Viennese school will prove to have either the wide appeal and staying-power of the first or the purely technical significance of the second, it is undeniably distinctive, and these recordings are timely evidence of that distinctiveness.'