This new edition of Gruber's cycle arose out of Frank Dupree's new recording of the work (Capriccio C5536), coupled with the composer's Piano Concerto. Dupree remarks, "HK Gruber had described this 1981 work to me as 'unplayable', which I took as a challenge. The four movements create utopian worlds - the eponymous Luftschlösser - which take up thoughts from Ernst Bloch's philosophical text The Principle of Hope. A castle, a princess and daydreams (not forgetting the mechanical) are the ingredients for a playful, enigmatic and unfathomable fairytale world, where some of the black humour of Gruber's Frankenstein!!, composed a few years before, lives on. Gruber's composition is a technically challenging piano piece with timeless appeal. It is written in a tonality full of powerful contrasts with contrapuntal polyphonic structures - at various times surreal, sarcastic, lyrical and dance-like, with 'shimmy'-style chains of syncopation."Instrumentation:piano