Concerto for String Orchestra
At-A-Glance
Composed: 1948
Length: c. 15 minutes
Orchestration: strings
First Los Angeles Philharmonic performance: First LA Phil performances.
About this Piece
Grażyna Bacewicz was given a nickname during her lifetime—“The First Lady of Polish Music.” A force of musical nature, she was the first Polish woman composer to achieve national and international acclaim. Like many celebrated musicians of the 20th century, Bacewicz studied composition in Paris in the 1930s with the seminal French music teacher and composer Nadia Boulanger. An accomplished violinist as well, Bacewicz took lessons with the renowned Hungarian pedagogue Carl Flesch and was principal violinist of the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra from 1936 to 1938.
Her career as a composer coincided with the post-World War II era, during which Poland was effectively governed by Joseph Stalin, and Bacewicz had to contend with Soviet censors. In Grazyna Bacewicz, The ‘First Lady of Polish Music’, author Diana Ambache writes, “There was a particularly oppressive period under Stalin’s control (1948–53) with the diktats of socialist realism, when the creative process was compromised by state censorship.” Despite the cultural confines, her career flourished.
In 1948, Bacewicz wrote what would become her most frequently performed work, Concerto for String Orchestra in three movements. The concerto premiered in June 1950, during a meeting of the General Assembly of the Polish Composers’ Union. That same year, it received the National Prize and was performed in the US by the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, DC. Bacewicz was praised by Polish critic Stefan Kisielewski for being a woman who saved the “honor of Polish composers,” branding the work as “a modern Brandenburg Concerto.”
In a 1958 letter to Lithuanian composer Vytautas Bacevicius, Bacewicz wrote, “The work of composing is like sculpting a stone, not like transmitting the sounds of imagination or inspiration…. There is a saying: The house will fall down if it were to be built without principles.” In composing her concerto, Bacewicz applied the foundation of the Baroque concerto grosso form, combining it with a rigorous approach to tonality and motivic development that features individual players.
Marked pesante (heavy), the first movement introduces the pervasive scales climbing up and down the fingerboards. Individual lines evolve into unexpected harmonies until solos pass between instruments—giving multiple players a moment to shine in this shared concerto. Range plays a critical role, such as when cellos climb high as the violins dig deep into their low register. This sense of expansion, much like an accordion, is underscored by sudden dynamic changes, swells, and exhilarating outbursts.
The violins are muted in the hauntingly beautiful opening of the slower second movement, clearing the way for the singing cello solo. Bacewicz builds an expressiveness into the melody with unexpected half steps. Solo moments stand out, with a climbing melody in the upper register of the viola passing seamlessly to the solo violin—creating a kind of hybrid instrument. The movement expands across the strings, culminating in 12 separate parts.
The lively final movement starts off with unified string sections, but not for long. As it continues, the sound accumulates as the parts divide. Melodic material and showy runs spin out of the scales that have been present since the first movement as the composition drives to the end.
Bacewicz’s music is frequently categorized as “neoclassicist,” a label that she personally objected to despite her predilection for using traditional forms such as the concerto grosso. On the subject, Polish composer Witold Lutosławski wrote: “Concerto for Strings is probably the highlight of that ‘no-nonsense’ period in Grażyna’s oeuvre which encyclopedias simplistically refer to as ‘neoclassical.’”—Anna Heflin