String Quartet No. 3

Driven by a pulsating rhythm whose three short beats and one long are irresistibly (perhaps intentionally) suggestive of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, the opening movement of this quartet declares itself an example of postwar neoclassicism, with the clean, crisp formality of something you’d expect to have come out of France. As, in a way, it did. Bacewicz was Polish, but she’d studied in Paris under Nadia Boulanger, and she was back there temporarily in 1947, when this music was composed. It was a bad time for the Poles, with Soviet domination swiftly replacing that of the Nazis. But as a performing violinist of distinction, Bacewicz had certain privileges, including concert tours to France. The elegant if energised Frenchness of her String Quartet No. 3 celebrates the inspiration she found there—as well as supplying a largely tonal language that satisfied Soviet Poland’s preference for "socialist realism" in the arts. Constructed on conventional terms, the three movements comprise a sonata-form “Allegro”, an arch-structured “Andante” and a rondo finale (“Vivo”) whose theme returns every time in a different key. An easily approached piece, No. 3 has always been the most popular of Bacewicz’s seven quartets. And as a group, they rank among the most significant quartet cycles of the 20th century.