Bacewicz: Violin Concertos Nos. 2, 3 & 4

Album review

This album marks the second release by Polish-born violinist Joanna Kurkowicz to be devoted to the concertos of Grazyna Bacewicz, a violinist/composer who survived World War II and Stalinism with her artistic vision intact. Not only that, she adapted the violin concerto, not a form in great favor in the 20th century, to waves of successive influences. As Eastern Europe emerges as the crucible where musicians tried to build a durable culture out of the 20th century's various musical and political "isms," Bacewicz's music is well worth keeping an eye on. The fluent violin writing here would please any general symphony-concert audience, and its considerable technical challenges pose no problems for Kurkowicz, and she is ably backed in the opening movements' complex solo-orchestra interplay by the Polish Radio Symphony Orchestra under Lukasz Borowicz. Almost alone, Bacewicz can be said to have reconciled the figure of the virtuoso-composer (her violin music was mostly written for her own use) with modern compositional languages. Even more impressive, however, is her ability to absorb several changes in the landscape and still maintain her own distinctive approach; she often tended toward a large, epic first movement, a slow nocturne in the middle, and a folkish finale. The three concertos on the album were composed between 1945 and 1954 (Kurkowicz's earlier Chandos release includes both earlier and later stages of Bacewicz's career). The Violin Concerto No. 2 (1945) includes French neo-classic influences; the Violin Concerto No. 4, written at the height of the Stalinist cultural campaign in 1951, has the epic, movie-like feel that appealed to the commissars but avoids triteness. Things had changed a great deal by the appearance of the Violin Concerto No. 5 in 1954, a taut little work with a rhythmically shifting first movement that seems to look forward to Polish modernism. Chandos' engineers, working at Polish Radio's Witold Lutoslawski Concert Hall, deliver attractively warm, transparent sound.

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