Grażyna Bacewicz

One of Poland’s major composers, Grażyna Bacewicz produced a large output whose style developed throughout her life, from a high-energy, powerfully expressive neo-classicism to an individual brand of modernism. Born in Łódź in 1909, she quickly showed prodigious talent as a violinist and pianist. But she was drawn equally to composing, and in 1932 won a scholarship to study in Paris with Nadia Boulanger, whose admiration for Stravinsky’s neo-classical idiom of that time was a decisive influence. In 1936, Bacewicz was appointed principal violinist of the Polish Radio Orchestra besides her teaching and composing work and international solo career. She withdrew most of her music written before her Violin Concerto No.1 (1937), whose orchestral accompaniment is as brilliantly inventive as its solo part. During the German wartime occupation of Warsaw, Bacewicz performed in secret “underground” concerts, giving the premiere of her solo Sonata for Violin in 1941. Outstanding works from the postwar years included the masterly Concerto for String Orchestra (1948) and String Quartet No. 4 (1951), and Bacewicz herself premiered her Piano Sonata No. 2 in 1953. Her performing career ended after a serious car accident in 1954, and, in the years before her death in 1969, she concentrated on composing, in an increasingly modernist style; major statements were her sixth and seventh string quartets (1960-65) and the Violin Concerto No. 7 (1965).