Morta Grigaliunaite - Bacewicz: Piano Music (2019)

Grazyna Bacewicz (1909-1969) is one of the most significant composers of the mid-20th century, and yet her music remains largely unknown. In the period be- tween the two world wars, she studied in Paris with Nadia Boulanger, like so many American, British, and Polish composers, but during her lifetime her reputation rarely translated itself into frequent performances outside her native Poland. Bacewicz had a distinctive creative personality and an intuitive approach to form that rewards close study. Her experience as an orchestral leader and concert violinist informed and enriched the string writing in the string quartets, violin concerts and sonatas which have received some attention on record. However, distinguished pianists such as Krystian Zimerman have recently begun to make a persuasive case for Bacewiczs piano writing, which may be appreciated at its freest and most demanding in the Second Piano Sonata which brings Morta Grigaliunaites recital to a thrilling close. Bacewicz declared that she did not see herself as an innovator but as a progressive composer: Each work completed today becomes the past yesterday. Her two sets of etudes tackle different techniques of pianism within clear, often ternary forms, but the imaginative ideas within them hint at her larger works in a similar way to the etudes and mazurkas of her compatriots Chopin and Szymanowski, highlighting her seemingly endless capacity for reinvention. Morta Grigaliunaite also includes in her survey a series of lighter works: the Little Triptych, the Concert Krakowiak, a Childrens Suite and Trois pièces caractéristiques most of them hardly more than a minute or two in length, yet all bursting with individual ideas which reveal Bacewiczs own considerable talents as a pianist.