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Remembering Polish composer Bacewicz

PR dla Zagranicy
Grzegorz Siwicki 17.01.2019 08:00
Poland on Thursday marks the 50th anniversary of the death of composer Grażyna Bacewicz.
A bust of Grażyna Bacewicz. Photo: Paweł Cieśla Staszek Szybki Jest [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], from Wikimedia CommonsA bust of Grażyna Bacewicz. Photo: Paweł Cieśla Staszek Szybki Jest [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], from Wikimedia Commons

Her Overture for Symphony Orchestra is on the programme of a concert by the Sinfonia Varsovia under Fuad Ibrahimov at Polish Radio’s Witold Lutosławski Hall on Thursday night.

Several of Bacewicz's works will also be performed during a music festival that is due to open in Warsaw on January 27.

This year marks the 110th anniversary of the composer’s birth.

Bacewicz graduated from the Warsaw Conservatory in 1932, earning degrees in composition and violin performance. She then continued her studies in Paris.

Even before she started performing as a violinist she began composing at age 13. Concert tours took her to many European countries. From 1953 she devoted herself entirely to composition.

Her output includes seven violin concertos, seven string quartets, two violin sonatas, four symphonies, works for piano solo, Concerto for String Orchestra, Piano Concerto, two cello concertos, Music for Strings, Trumpets and Percussion, ballets and songs.

In her music, Bacewicz drew on the aesthetics of Karol Szymanowski, who exerted a profound influence on several generations of 20th-century Polish composers.

In his study on Bacewicz’s chamber and orchestral music published in the United States in 1985, British musicologist Adrian Thomas wrote: “Bacewicz’s position in twentieth-century Polish music is distinguished by three principal factors.

“Firstly, she maintained an independence and a stylistic individuality in the difficult post-war decade that was matched by few of her contemporaries.

“Secondly, she was the only Polish composer who studied in Paris in the inter-war years to make such a determined effort to update her musical language in the early 1960s. That she experimented as much as she did is cause for some wonderment.

“Thirdly, she was a woman composer at a time when this was still somewhat unusual. By dint of her own efforts, she came to be recognized as one of the foremost Polish composers of the mid-twentieth century, regardless of her sex.”

Bacewicz was born on February 5, 1909. She died on January 17, 1969.

(mk/gs)

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