The common denominator of the three works presented here is the soloist Håkan Hardenberger. In 1999, the celebrated trumpet player asked HK Gruber to arrange his 3 MOB Pieces for trumpet and orchestra, and eight years later Gruber wrote the concerto Busking while his long-time collaborator Kurt Schwertsik wrote Divertimento Macchiato, both on Hardenberger’s initiative. In the 1960s Schwertsik and Gruber became known as ambassadors of the ‘Third Viennese School’ – a grouping which originated as a reaction against the total serialism of Darmstadt-centred avant-garde. One of the first manifestations of this was the ‘MOB art & tone ART’ Ensemble, in which the two composers and their friends performed new music of a deliberately informal, un-solemn sort. With influences as diverse as the neo-classicism of Stravinsky, the Beatles and the cabaret music by Hanns Eisler and Kurt Weill, the MOB Pieces, composed in 1968, are a perfect illustration of this. Gruber’s work has always shown a strong connection with various kinds of popular music, and his concerto Busking is another example. In each of its three movements the soloist plays a trumpet in a different key, with the accompaniment of an accordion, a banjo and strings. Often the accor­dion and banjo join the trumpet as a solo group, with a resulting sound evocative of street musicians and New Orleans jazz. On the surface, Schwertsik has remained closer to home, by taking recourse to a form typical of the classicism of Vienna during Mozart’s days. But the title Divertimento is deceptive – Schwertsik adds both melancholy and defiance to a work that appears, on the face of it, to offer easy-on-the-ear entertainment, and the five-movement work ends with an epilogue for the trumpet alone – a soliloquy almost Mahlerian in its sense of loneliness and desolation.