It was inevitable that HK Gruber’s most famous work would return to the catalogue. Given definitive shape in 1978, Frankenstein!! finds his brand of postmodernism at its most direct. Yet the amalgam of HC Artmann’s covertly political “nonsense rhymes” with Gruber’s would-be anarchic cabaret now feels too contrived in its conveying of a knowing humour, while the composer’s role as “chansonnier”, carried out here with aplomb, is more akin to a neurotic compère than sinister master-of-ceremonies. This performance is attuned to its every ambivalence, with Gruber’s kazoos and whistles vividly captured, but his association with Artmann is better represented by the more recent Zeitstimmung.

That work recently appeared on the excellent BIS disc under Krystian Järvi (1/07), together with Gruber’s percussion concerto Rough Music and Charivari (1983). Good as Kristian Järvi’s account was, the composer makes more of the latter piece’s disquieting tour through the debris of Austrian musical culture – deftly utilising the remorseless tread of Strauss’s Perpetuum mobile as the springboard for his own journey. Related in concept but more demonstrative in impact, Dancing in the Dark (2003) is a “concert piece” that synthesises recollections of the Austro-German symphonic tradition with pre-war dance music: thus the hit song (Arthur Schwartz rather than Bruce Springsteen!) that provides the work’s title, besides indicating the heightened emotion that will blow attempts at formal and expressive unity apart by the close. Gruber secures an unsparing response from the BBC Philharmonic, superbly recorded, and those new to his music will find this an ideal disc to start their exploration.