SPCO's 'Frankenstein!!' is an HK Gruber tour de force

Whisk together a postmodernized Kurt Weill, Peter Schickele at his most clownish and the Stephen Sondheim of "Sweeney Todd," and you'll have a rough approximation of Austrian HK Gruber, or at least the Gruber who devised "Frankenstein!!" The madcap, macabre, cabaret-ish concoction, its double exclamation point mandated by the composer, didn't quite bring down the house at the close of Saturday's concert by the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra at Ordway Center.

Set to anarchic poems, ostensibly for children, by the surrealist H.C. Artmann, "Frankenstein!!" is a palpable hit, having enjoyed more than 1,000 performances since assuming its current form about three decades ago. Parasitic on the popular culture of its day -- Batman and Robin, John Wayne and James Bond populate Artmann's verses -- it shows some signs of wear. Yet it is more than a frothy entertainment merely useful for selling tickets on Halloween. Beneath the gags and ghouls, the irony and mockery, Gruber is pressing a still-unresolved argument with the post-World War II compositional establishment. (Discussing with an interviewer his hostile reception at the hands of Vienna's avant-garde, Gruber once quipped that "They dislike my music because it reminds them of music.")

The 13 instrumentalists of "Frankenstein!!" are enjoined to sing, whirl corrugated tubes above their heads and pop inflated paper bags; the SPCO players, poker-faced, met these demands with good grace. But the performance was, above all, a tour de force for the multitasking Gruber, a 66-year-old ex-choirboy of formidable comic gifts, who conducted, declaimed and played a mean kazoo, all without breaking a sweat.

Gruber's "Busking" (2007), given its U.S. premiere at these concerts, was co-commissioned by the SPCO and three European orchestras. Written for trumpet titan Håkan Hardenberger, it is more ambitious than "Frankenstein!!" but rather less successful. (It's also nearly half again as long as the 20 minutes stipulated in the printed program.) Though he coped heroically with a succession of mutes, mouthpieces and instruments, including a husky-toned fluegelhorn, the hard-working Hardenberger seemed hard put to find felicity or flow.

Two Gruber-compatible chamber works from the early 1920s, illustrative of that period's less-is-more aesthetic, filled out the evening. The admirable Parker Quartet, Young Artists in Residence at the SPCO, dug into the dissonances of Stravinsky's ragtime-scented Concertino. And five of the orchestra's principal wind players proffered a properly peppery account of Hindemith's Little Chamber Music, Op. 24, No. 2.

Larry Fuchsberg writes frequently about music.