Schwertsik: Baumges�nge

�Gruber directs with conviction music he doubtless understands intuitively, while the BBC PO takes its many subtleties in its stride. Spaciously immediate sound, informative notes and a disc worth acquiring.� --Gramophone Magazine, November 2011

�Schwertsik's Viennese blend of gentle irony, nostalgia and absurdism has made little headway in the UK. This beautifully played orchestra disc should help.� --BBC Music Magazine, December 2011 ****

 

�Gruber ensures the best possible performances of music that proves very engaging... When listening there is an invitation to return to these appealing scores, and it�s difficult to think of them being better served than in these performance conducted by Gruber and captured in dynamic and vivid sound.� --International Record Review � September 2011

�Gruber is the BBC Phil�s composer/conductor, and Schwertsik (b1935) his lifelong Viennese friend and mentor, whose work he has tirelessly promulgated. These pieces well convey Schwertsik�s mercurial, ironic sensibility and his dextrous juggling of Romantic tonality and modernist impulse.� --Sunday Times, 4th September 2011

�The effectiveness of [Schwertsik 's] reconstituted language is shown in the three orchestral works by his close friend that Gruber conducts here. Nachtmusiken is the most recent: first performed by the BBC Philharmonic last year, it's a sequence of Viennese nocturnes, elegies and reminiscences of composers including Jan�cek, Mahler and Shostakovich.� --The Guardian, 25th August 2011 ****

�This disc of music by the quirky Austrian Kurt Schwertsik is a consistent joy...Schwertsik is far more than a skilled pastiche artist � ghosts from several centuries of Western art music drift in and out of these scores without overwhelming a distinctive and drily witty personality...Fantastic stuff, and sumptuously recorded.� --The Arts Desk, 15th October 2011