Grazyna Bacewicz

Listen to Music for Strings, Trumpets and Percussion: excerpt from first movement, Allegro

GRAŻYNA BACEWICZ

Concerto for String Orchestra
Sinfonietta
Symphony
Music for Strings, Trumpets and Percussion

New London Orchestra
Ronald Corp, conductor

Total duration: 66' 19"

HYPERION CDA67783

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'A thoroughly rewarding survey of a composer who deserves to be better known… [Music for Strings, Trumpets and Percussion] is music of lament and even of protest, but it has a positive spirit concerned to communicate no less urgently and distinctively than the composer's more "orthodox" earlier pieces'

Gramophone

This disc from the New London Orchestra under Ronald Corp showcases the work of Grazyna Bacewicz (1909–1969), whose centenary is celebrated this year [2009]. It contributes greatly to the knowledge of her music outside her native Poland, where she is still an important and well-loved cultural figure, one of those who led to Polish music becoming one of the main contributors to European culture in the second half of the twentieth century. It contains the premiere recordings of both the Sinfonietta and the Symphony for string orchestra.

Bacewicz was one of the most significant composers of the mid-twentieth century, with strong roots in the culture of Paris, where she studied both composition and violin in the early 1930s. Her most striking music is that which draws on her experience of the neoclassicism of inter-war France. She emphasizes neoclassicism’s vitality and clarity while at the same time giving it a combination of delicacy and muscularity which is all her own. While she demonstrates both wit and joie de vivre, her music is never frivolous.

Adrian Thomas © 2009

Read more about Bacewicz at The Polish Music Center

This recording was made possible by The Polish Cultural Institute