Joh Wick 4 2023

This fourth instalment of the recent symphonic output of Fridrich Bruk (born in Ukraine in 1937 but a Finnish resident since 1974) brings two earlier works – from when Bruk was merely in his late seventies. His Symphonies Nos. 15 and 16 – both predicated on Bruk’s concern for the environment – inhabit the sound-world that has become familiar from his more recent symphonies: almost a stream of consciousness expressed through wildly inventive orchestral writing in a kaleidoscope of colour and counterpoint, sitting somewhere between Villa-Lobos and Pettersson in its profligate abundance.

Born in 1624, Giovanni Antonio Pandolfi Mealli was brought up partly in Venice and ended up in Innsbruck as a member of the Court Band. His name crops up later as a violinist in churches and at court in Messina and finally in Madrid, where it is likely that he died in 1687. There were two important stylistic periods for violin literature in the 17th century. In the early decades, a corpus of instrumental music appeared in northern Italy, with the first solo music explicitly for violin being written by composers such as Castello, Fontana and – most of all – Marini. Towards the tail-end of the century, we see the flowering of a refined culture of instrumental music in Austria, dominated by virtuosi such as Biber, Walther and Schmelzer. Pandolfi Mealli was caught in the middle, not being a follower of either school, and may have been somewhat lost from view among all these star performers.