Grazyna Bacewicz’s piano works are not so well known as her violin works and no wonder as it was because of the latter that the composer came to prominence in twentieth-century music. Can this be really justifiable? As usual such opinions lead to simplifications which sometimes even belie the facts. Gra?yna Bacewicz was a performing violinist but she was also an excellent pianist so her interest in the piano was even more natural. This can be ”heard” not only in her piano miniatures or her concertos for one or two pianos but also in the piano parts of both her quintets and the sonatas for violin and piano. Out of this interest grew an impressive collection of interesting works such as the popular Children’s Suite the Concert Studies (which gained her a prize) or the Second Sonata most frequently performed and recently recorded by Krystian Zimerman. The Concert Krakowiak which won a prize at the 2nd F. Chopin Composition Competition organised by the Polish Composers’ Union to mark the one hundredth anniversary of the composer’s death is also one of them. This piece dedicated to Stanis?aw Szpinalski Paderewski’s pupil and a well-known performer of his Fantastic Krakowiak involuntarily brings to mind the work of the great master but it has little in common with it; the compositions belong to two different epochs. In Bacewicz’s output the piano has a specific sharpness of the tone emphasised by the use of extreme registers. Harmonies have a characteristic roughness and pungency arising from various combinations of intervals of seconds fourths and fifths. The lively musical narrative both light and mercurial is evolved in this case from motifs of popular krakowiak melodies which the composer subjects to all kinds of motivic harmonic and rhythmic transformations – sometimes deceptive or even grotesque (the change of major/minor modes) as if poking fun at the listener. Bacewicz’s Krakowiak strikes one with the freshness of its original creative invention full of ideas and with its effective ”concert” bravura in the full sense of the word. [Elzbieta Wid?ak]

Concert Krakowiak

Composer: Grazyna Bacewicz
Publisher: PWM Edition
Instrument: Piano
Format: Piano Solo
Pages: 20