Fridrich Bruk: Orchestral Music, Volume One

Fridrich Bruk – born in Kharkov in 1937 and a Finnish resident since 1974 – made his name as a composer of tangos. But the heart of his music lies in a series of eighteen symphonies, which have a strong narrative element, some reflecting Jewish themes, others inspired by Karelia and Finland. Symphony No. 17, Joy of Life (which Bruk also calls a ‘Concerto-Symphony for Orchestra and Piano’),has an autobiographical programme charting, in abstract terms, Bruk’s surmounting of the obstacles fate put in his path. Symphony No. 18 takes as its starting point a Latvian-Jewish folksong: it is premised on the deportation of his grandparents from their Latvian home, in an anti-Semitic campaign by Tsarist Russia that Bruksees as a kind of prologue to the Holocaust.