Grażyna Bacewicz - Orchestral Works, Vol. 1 (Sakari Oramo)

Information

Composer: Grażyna Bacewicz

• Symphony No. 3
• Symphony No. 4
• Overture

BBC Symphony Orchestra

Sakari Oramo, conductor

Date: 2023

Label: Chandos

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Review

After a flurry of releases underlining the major talent that was Grażyna Bacewicz, perhaps this no-less-admirable contribution from Sakari Oramo and the BBC Symphony Orchestra unwittingly reveals the composer’s Achilles heel. Her final two symphonies were written within the decade from 1943. Yes, the music is as arresting, rich, wilful and brutalist as we’ve been getting used to but listening to these symphonies – traditional in design but with shortish constituent parts – David Fanning’s reference to Bacewicz’s ‘short-windedness’ (7/23) lingers heavy in the mind. It is not, I’d suggest, a quality that sits well with her tendency towards epic, big-boned scoring, particularly in a symphonic setting.

Never is the composer’s craft in doubt. Symphony No 3 brims with detail from its opening but the cell from which the music is efficiently derived is indistinct. Bacewicz winds things up with her characteristic ability to make the constructed sound impulsive but you do occasionally sense some soul missing, even in the persuasive rise of the ominous Andante. Something definitely gets going in the finale – good architecture in which seeds are clearly sown – only for it to stop short (there is some highly articulate playing here from the BBC Symphony Orchestra, particularly in all the concerto-for-orchestra-like contributing chatter).

Similar observations emerge from all the tight but oddly non-cumulative discussions of the Symphony No 4, even if the quasi-American parallel harmonies of the Adagio and the manic, buzzing Scherzo prick the ear. Listen to the brass swells here to hear the BBC SO’s quality – which might, alongside Chandos’s sound, be the differential between this and the identical coupling from the radio orchestra in Cologne released earlier this year (CPO, 3/23).

When we get to the whirl of the final Allegro furioso – whose slow introduction atmospherically emerges out of the fray of that Scherzo – you’re not quite clear what exactly is being culminated. A cold ending follows. That, of course, might be the point: this was a soulless, cruel time for the composer and her Poland, in which sense these scores can be read as reflective of the environment in which they were written, in which Europe apparently couldn’t sustain any sense of humanity. So no lack of confidence or technique (the same goes for the Overture), but it’s my inclination to return to other Bacewicz before these symphonies, however good it is to hear them.

— Andrew Mellor

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Grażyna Bacewicz (5 February 1909 – 17 January 1969) was a Polish composer and violinist of Lithuanian origin. Educated in Łódź, Warsaw and Paris, she studied composition with Kazimierz Sikorski and Nadia Boulanger and violin with prominent teachers including Carl Flesch. She achieved early recognition as a performer and later devoted herself primarily to composition and teaching. Bacewicz produced a substantial body of neoclassical music, with particular emphasis on violin and string repertoire, including seven violin concertos and seven string quartets. Her works received numerous international and national awards.

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Sakari Oramo (born 26 October 1965) is a Finnish conductor. Born in Helsinki, he started his career as a violinist and concertmaster of the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, and studied in Jorma Panula's conducting class at the Sibelius Academy. Oramo was principal conductor of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra (1998–2008), the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra (2003–2012), and the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra (2008–2021). Since 2013, he has been chief conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, with which he has recorded commercially for such labels as harmonia mundi and Chandos.

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