Bruk: Orchestral Music, Vol. 3

This third instalment of the recent symphonic output of Fridrich Bruk (born in Ukraine in 1937 but a Finnish resident since 1974) brings two works of astonishing vitality for a composer in his eighties. Both of them have social undercurrents: Symphony No. 22 is driven by ecological concerns about the pollution of the world’s oceans, and No. 23 takes its material from folk-melodies of the Ingrians, a vanishing ethnic group on the Finnish-Russian border. The orchestral writing in both pieces is passionate and wildly inventive, a kaleidoscope of color and counterpoint, sitting somewhere between Villa-Lobos and Pettersson in its profligate abundance.