Piano Sonata No. 2

On paper, Grażyna Bacewicz’s Piano Sonata No. 2 looks an unlikely masterpiece to have emerged from communist Poland. But like everything Bacewicz wrote, it’s grounded in a passionate commitment to self-expression and the logic of classical form. “I believe that if you place things randomly or throw rocks on a pile, that pile will always collapse,” she wrote. “So in music there must be rules of construction that will allow the work to stand on its feet.” Bacewicz premiered the Sonata in Warsaw in December 1953. A brief introduction (“Maestoso”) evokes the improvisatory spirit—suitably modernised—of her great Polish predecessor Chopin, before launching into a headlong “Agitato” with an unmistakably 20th-century energy. A brief moment of stillness at its heart prefigures the spacious, brooding chorale of the sonata’s second movement. And the finale is a little whirlwind: a brilliantly virtuosic “Toccata” built on the springing rhythm of a Polish dance called an oberek, but wrought from pure steel.