Thirties agitprop revisited: The music of Hanns Eisler Queen Elizabeth Hall, London

Eisler is not a household name nowadays - star pupil of Schoenberg, composer of film, theatre and abstract music, very much part of the left-wing agitprop movement of the Twenties and Thirties, he collaborated with Brecht, fled the Nazi terror in Europe, only to be ejected from America during the McCarthy era, and settled finally in East Berlin as composer laureate of the German Communist regime. His music has not gained the popularity of his contemporary Kurt Weill, but this centenary day gave an idea of its breadth and stature. Chamber music, discussions, a new film of the composer's life, "worker's choruses", etc, culminated in a concert by the London Sinfonietta under the extraordinary Viennese composer, conductor and Eisler enthusiast HK Gruber.

Eisler's Kleine Sinfonie, Op 29, had remarkable clarity and concentration - and something of the urgency and driving quality of Schoenberg's Chamber Symphony, but without that work's curiously clotted character. The Sinfonietta polished the piece off with precision and relish. Equally striking was the incidental music for Johann Nestroy's play, Hollenangst ("Fear of Hell") - surprisingly light and witty, given that it came immediately after Eisler's ignominious deportation from the US. After an almost Mozartian overture, Gruber delivered four songs whose lucid textures included echoes of Weill. 1932 was a more predictable agitprop piece with such resounding titles as "In Praise of Dialectic". The ensemble was reminiscent of Weill's Threepenny Opera, with its plangent banjo and slick saxophones. This kind of thing has not weathered well - "socialist realist" sentiments and (red) flag-waving ring rather hollow in the late Nineties, and even Ebraham's searing performance of Death of a Comrade tended merely to raise uncomfortable questions about the use of art to arouse emotion in aid of ideology. HK Gruber's own extended Zeitstimmung concluded proceedings with a seemingly endless stream-of-consciousness-style setting of the surrealist poems of HC Artmann.