From Vienna, an antic streak

HK Gruber is a boisterous bright light in modern music. A member of the so-called Third Viennese School, he has over the years proudly outraged his hometown atonalists and traditionalists alike by bringing popular influences -- Kurt Weill, the Beatles, jazz and the dance band -- into the sanctity of the classical Viennese concert hall.

After more than four decades on the barricades, Gruber and his colleagues -- the slyly and lovably subversive Kurt Schwertsik and the more sober Friedrich Cerha -- are by now internationally mainstream. But that doesn’t mean we hear nearly enough of them. The final program in the Green Umbrella series at the Colburn School’s Zipper Hall on Monday, with the Los Angeles Philharmonic conducted by Gruber, was a wonderful example of just how fresh these composers still feel.

Schwertsik is the least known of the three Viennese renegades, and that should change immediately. In a preconcert talk, the exuberant, jovial Gruber described Schwertsik as the most contrary of his group of co-conspirators. John Magnum’s program note called “Transformation Music,” which opened the concert, “simple, straightforward, tuneful and highly approachable.” Those two comments are not a contradiction if you add “deceptively” in front of all those descriptive adjectives.

The adorable score is a 12-part suite taken from Schwertsik’s 1983 opera, “The Wondrous Tale of Fanferlizzy Sunnyfeet,” concerning a witch and her singing goat in the kingdom of Scandalia. Witch and goat march to wacky, chirpy tunes; there are cheerful, contrapuntally displaced fanfares in flutes. Loveliness pervades in evocations of castles in the air and a slightly drunken lullaby for violin and piano. Everything is delightfully off-kilter, be it the strange instrumentation, the rhythms that don’t quite jell on the beat or the simple harmonies blurred by the composer’s love of drones.

The Cerha piece on the program was a string sextet, “Eight Movements After Holderlin Fragments,” written in 1995. With the textures and sound of Schoenberg’s early “Transfigured Night” clearly in mind, Cerha evoked the existential angst in fragments of poet Friedrich Holderlin’s verse through intense, chromatic music that ranges from nervous scurrying to practically standing still in slow-moving gloomy harmonics. In the last section, sliding music has the effect of falling over and over again.

Gruber concluded the program with the first U.S. performance of “Timescapes,” a chamber concerto co-commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic along with ensembles in London, Stockholm and Basel, Switzerland, where it had its premiere in 2001. The 25-minute score is dedicated to the memory of the Austrian poet H.C. Artmann, who wrote the zany text to Gruber’s best-known work, “Frankenstein!!”

Beneath the trickster exterior there is a mystical streak to Gruber that was in evidence during the funereal first movement, “Nightdust,” where powerful climaxes rise as if out of thin air. In the antic second movement, “Another Day,” life goes on, but changed. Dance band music prevails but in highly charged, expressionistic fashion; life is fun, it might be saying, but never without pain.

Gruber has not always been the persuasive conductor he proved on this occasion. Several years ago he retired as an orchestra bass player to devote himself full time to composing and conducting, and it seems to have paid off on the podium.

The response he got from the Philharmonic musicians was first-rate. Schwertsik’s piece sparkled under Gruber’s tight yet playful command; Gruber’s own score was played with gripping emotion. Cerha’s sextet, unconducted, was given a most sympathetic performance.