The World of Grażyna Bacewicz

The third annual Bard Music West festival took place at the Noe Valley Ministry a couple of weekends ago, focusing on Grażyna Bacewicz, a great 20th century composer (1909-1969) whose music most people outside of Poland have never heard. The two co-founders of Bard Music West, pianist Allegra Chapman above and cellist Laura Gaynon, stumbled across Bacewicz while on a trip to Poland a couple of years ago, and decided to present a festival dedicated to the underplayed composer, feeling she was the equal of her more famous contemporaries.

They were right and all of Bacewicz's music that I heard over two days at the festival was great, and so were the performances, including, left to right, violinists Mélanie Clapiès and YuEun Kim, cellist Laura Gaynon, and violist Jessica Chang, playing the composer's String Quartet #1 (1938). Bacewicz's style of composition early in her career was "neoclassical," a label she disputed, and it sounded more like a Bartok or Shostakovich string quartet than anything by Stravinsky, for instance.

Bacewicz grew up in a musical family and was both a piano and violin virtuoso besides a precocious composer. After studying at the Warsaw Conservatory under the wonderful Polish composer Karol Szymanowski, she went to Paris and studied with Nadia Boulanger. Nadia was a Monteverdi fan and conducted a famous 1937 recording of his 9 Madrigals. So the festival offered three of those nine madrigals in a performance by EQV: left to right mezzo-soprano Colby Smith, countertenor Sam Faustine, bass PJ Dennis, tenor Tim Silva and soprano Yuhi Alzawa Combatti.

This was followed by Jeffrey LaDeur playing solo piano music by contemporary influencers: Boulanger, Szymanowski, Paderewski, and Debussy, followed by clarinetest Bill Kalinkos playing Three Pieces for Solo Clarinet (1918) by Stravinsky.

The festival's opening concert ended with the masterpiece of the evening, Bacewicz's 1952 Piano Quintet #1 with violinists YuEun Kim Mélanie Clapiès, pianist Allegra Chapman, cellist Laura Gaynon, and violist Jessica Chang.

The Saturday afternoon concert featured a world premiere, a tradition at Bard Music West. Called Remains: Trio for Strings, it was written by French violinist and composer Mélanie Clapiès above. Unfortunately, she gave an introduction in heavily accented English that was almost as long as the programmatic work about war and mourning itself.

The intro sort of ruined the piece for a few of my friends, but I liked the music a lot, particularly the use of simple vocalising by the string players along with rhythmic stomping for advancing armies. Pictured are Mélanie Clapiès, violin, Laura Gaynon, cello, and Jessica Chang, viola

The incomparable new music soprano, Sara LeMesh, arrived for a grab-bag of Polish art songs, including a jazzy pop song by Lutoslawski of all people (I'm not expecting anybody, 1959), two vocalises from 1949 Andrzej Panufnik's 1949 Hommage a Chopin and his 1944 patriotic Children of Warsaw, and Bacewicz's amusing I have a headache, 1955.

Finally, the festival turned its full focus on Grażyna's music, starting with pianist Allegra Chapman and violinist Luosha Fang playing the Partita for Violin and Piano (1955). After intermission, Chapman returned and played the stuffing out of Bacewicz's 1953 Piano Sonata #2. Even though composing and playing/teaching the violin, the composer herself performed the premiere and she must have been a truly superb pianist because this piece sounded fiendish at times.

The Tesla Quartet (Michelle Lie and Ross Snyder, violins, Edwin Kaplan, viola and Serafim Smigelskly, cello) finished the concert with another masterpiece, Bacewicz's 1951 String Quartet #4, in a tight, thrilling performance.

There was a third festival concert that evening which I did not attend because concentrated listening to new music for hours at a time is exhausting. I salute those who made it through all three concerts, to the excellent performers, and to Chapman and Gaynon for introducing a new-to-most composer. It would be wonderful hearing more Bacewicz at the SF Symphony and elsewhere, because there are plenty of her symphonies and concertos and ballets that would all reward hearing at a live performance.