The album features her Piano Concerto, Concerto for Two Pianos, Overture, and Music for Strings, Trumpet and Percussion, recorded by the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra under Nicholas Collon, with pianists Peter Jablonski and Elisabeth Brauss.
Author and broadcaster Norman Lebrecht has named the recording "The Album of the Week" on his slippedisc.com classical music news site.
In a review entitled "Is there a more elusive composer in the whole of the 20th century than Grażyna Bacewicz?" Lebrecht writes that Bacewicz’s "sound does not fit somehow in the Polish tapestry of Szymanowski, Lutosławski, Panufnik and Penderecki. She is an outsider, and not by reasons of gender. Bacewicz holds herself apart.”
Lebrecht adds: “I keep wanting to like Bacewicz more, but I find it hard to understand that a composer who lived in Poland through its worst era withholds the entirety of her experience from posterity. How is that possible?”
The Bacewicz recording for Ondine was co-produced with the Warsaw-based Adam Mickiewicz Institute and financed by the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage as part of an international cultural programme marking the centenary of Poland regaining independence.
Born in 1909 into a Polish-Lithuanian family, Bacewicz started her education at the Music Conservatory in Łódź at the age of 10 and continued it at the Warsaw Conservatory, studying both composition and violin. She graduated in 1932 and then went on to study at postgraduate level in Paris.
Her career as a violinist developed in a spectacular way. In 1935, she received an honourable mention at the 1st Henryk Wieniawski International Violin Competition. In later years, she served as leader of the Polish Radio Orchestra in Warsaw and pursued an intensive concert career in Poland and abroad.
After the war, she continued her solo career, with recitals in many European countries. From 1955 onward she devoted herself solely to composition.
Bacewicz died in 1969. Her output includes seven violin concertos, two cello concertos, one viola concerto, seven string quartets, four symphonies, one opera, a ballet, five sonatas for violin and piano, two sonatas for solo violin and numerous other chamber pieces.
(mk/gs)