Grazyna Bacewicz – Complete String Quartets, Vol. 1 – Lutoslawski Quartet (2015) [Qobuz FLAC 24bit/96kHz]

Grazyna Bacewicz – Complete String Quartets, Vol. 1 – Lutoslawski Quartet (2015)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:10:26 minutes | 1,18 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Master, Official Digital Download – Source: Qobuz | © Naxos
Recorded: Wrocław Philharmonic Concert Hall, Poland, from 15th to 17th November, 2012 (tracks 1-4, 8-13), and from 11th to 17th December, 2012 (tracks 5-7)

Musicologist Adrian Thomas considered Grażyna Bacewicz’s string quartets “unrivalled in 20th-century Polish music and… one of the century’s most significant contributions to the genre”. Her folk-music infused First Quartet dates from student days at the Paris Conservatoire, while exceptional polyphonic skill, intense emotion and playful, high spirits characterize the Third Quartet. Both the Sixth and Seventh Quartets unite tradition with a strikingly effective and highly personal exploration of progressive contemporary techniques. As Lutosławski observed, in the “rapidly changing artistic currents” of the times, “it was [Bacewicz’s] music which helped create that atmosphere”.

The composer, Witold Lutosławski, once commented that, in the rapidly changing artistic currents, it was Grażyna Bacewicz who helped to create that atmosphere. Born in Poland in 1909, and an infant prodigy violinist, she was to be torn between the financial rewards received as a busy orchestral musician and her desire to compose, a longing born out of time spent in Paris as a student of Nadia Boulanger. The progress in that part of her career was well charted in her string quartets spread through almost thirty years of a life cut short when she was sixty. The First dates from her student days, and pointed to a harmonically adventurous inner-self, atonality rubbing shoulders with tonality in a direct reference to Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht that opens the second movement, while the third changes to a cheerful and busy folk-dance. Moving forward eight years we enter a more outgoing and virtuoso era for the Third Quartet, the fast interplay between instruments that shapes the outer movements reminding us of Hindemith’s quartets. In 1956 her presence at the First International Festival of Contemporary Music held in Warsaw initiated a final change in her style of composition, and two quartets—the Sixth and Seventh—following in 1960 and 1965. Often introverted in content, and now aligning herself with twelve-tone composers, she had become the dramatic experimentalist that had always been smouldering below the surface of her works. New sonorities fly around in fast movements, while slow ones have a sense of fear of the unknown, yet even in this final phase there was an immediate likability in her music that she passed to the following generation of Polish composers. A superbly played and recorded disc—the first in a complete cycle of her quartets from the celebrated Lutosławski Quartet—and it has my most enthusiastic recommendation. -David’s Review Corner
Tracklist:

Grażyna Bacewicz (1909-1969)

String Quartet No. 6 (1960)
1. I. Andante – Vivo 07:06
2. II. Vivace 03:42
3. III. Grave 03:46
4. IV. dotted quarter note = 114 03:05

String Quartet No. 1 (1939)
5. I. Moderato – Piu mosso 06:12
6. II. Tema con variazioni 06:33
7. III. Vivo 04:12

String Quartet No. 3 (1947)
8. I. Allegro ma non troppo 06:30
9. II. Andante 06:26
10. III. Vivo 05:55

String Quartet No. 7 (1965)
11. I. Allegro 06:05
12. II. Grave 06:20
13. III. Con vivezza 05:12

Lutosławski Quartet:
Jakub Jakowicz, Violin I
Marcin Markowicz, Violin II
Artur Rozmysłowicz, Viola
Maciej Młodawski, Cello

Download:

mqs.link_GrazynaBacewiczCmpleteStringQuartetsVl.1LutsawskiQuartet20159624.part1.rar
mqs.link_GrazynaBacewiczCmpleteStringQuartetsVl.1LutsawskiQuartet20159624.part2.rar