Lithuanian State Symphony Orchestra - Orchestral Music, Vol. 5 - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

This fifth instalment of the recent symphonic output of Fridrich Bruk (born in Ukraine in 1937 but a Finnish resident since 1974) brings two large canvases inspired by painters Symphony No. 13 by the revolutionary Soviet artist Kazimir Malevich, and No. 14 by Edvard Munch's famous painting The Scream. Bruk may seem to write in a kind of stream of consciousness, but his works are subtly bound together through a network of motifs and details of scoring. Even so, the orchestral writing in both pieces is wildly inventive, a kaleidoscope of colour and counterpoint, sitting somewhere between Villa-Lobos and Pettersson in it's profligate abundance, with hints here and there of Prokofiev and Szymanowski.