Bacewicz: Piano Sonato No 2; Piano Quintets Nos 1 & 2 – review

Graz˙yna Bacewicz belonged to the same generation of Polish composers as Witold Lutosławski. Though she studied with Nadia Boulanger in Paris in the early 1930s, her first career was as a violinist (she led the Polish radio orchestra) before concentrating on composition after the second world war. Her output is dominated by works for her own instrument, but she was also a fine pianist, and recorded her own Second Piano Sonata, included here. It was composed in 1953, the year after the premiere of the First Piano Quintet; both works are fundamentally neoclassical, with airy textures and echoes of Polish folk music, though the piano sonata seems more highly wrought and racked than the quintet. The Second Piano Quintet is later, from the mid 1960s, by which time Bacewicz was employing some of the avant-garde techniques of her contemporaries; the proportions of the three movements are still elegantly spacious, but they are filled in collage-like fashion. The recordings stem from a centenary concert in Kraków in 2009 (though whether live or made later in a studio isn't clear). The performances are outstanding, and Krystian Zimerman's account of the finale of the Second Sonata is quite dazzling.