Fernandel - Don Camillo (1952-1953) - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Rare-instrument specialist Thomas Bloch is equally at home performing on the soundtrack to Milos Forman' Amadeus, with rock group Radiohead, or at La Scala, Milan or the Salzburg Festival.

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 it's 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 it's profligate abundance.

No other could have celebrated French West Indian festivities with such joy or treat the beguine with such satire and derision.