Another year, another Grażyna Bacewicz portrait CD. CPO’s series Complete Symphonic Works, begun in 2023 and featuring the WDR Symphony Orchestra, concluded after three volumes with the wildly inaccurate claim that they’d released the lot. The BBC Symphony Orchestra’s Orchestral Works series on Chandos, also begun in 2023, has only now reached its second volume; it remains to be seen whether they’ll keep the ball rolling and be a bit more exhaustive.
Whether they should or not is another matter; in my previous articles i’ve explored the extent to which Bacewicz’s output seems to be largely stuck in just two modes of expression, a less-used lyrical side, and a bombastic, frivolous side that’s usually the music’s default position. However, this latest album gives one pause for thought, as it’s by far the most impressive Bacewicz portrait disc to date, due to a combination of the featured works – including two of her finest – and the performances.
Symphony No. 2, from 1951, is undoubtedly the best of the four Bacewicz composed. This is due to the nature of the relationship between those two expressive modes, which coexist in an interesting tension. In Sakari Oramo’s hands, the work actually becomes something of a diptych, with two lyrically-focused movements followed by two rhythmically-charged ones. Oramo certainly makes the most of the instruction Con passione, with a really strong opening, sidestepping the somewhat Brucknerian hints brought to it in Łukasz Borowicz’s CPO recording, instead creating a fascinating mixture of singing one minute and pushing on the next. There’s again a filmic sense at the music’s most energetic – foreshadowing John Williams in its punchy material – but Oramo balances that with a lighter tone. Throughout the disc his pace is generally slower than Borowicz’s, and that works to the music’s advantage, preventing it from ever sounding too mindlessly exuberant. The second movement thus becomes a curious kind of brisk processional, where the music is allowed more scope, simultaneously flowing and stacking up layers. The effect is genuinely lovely, nowhere more so than the ending, where oblique chords glance against the melody’s close.
While the Scherzo doesn’t really feel connected to any of what’s gone before, it’s impossible not to be won over by this superb performance. Though measured, Oramo keeps the pace going such that it neither chugs nor becomes light and trivial (as with Borowicz). Its short and sweet, jaunty exuberance is extended through the Finale where, even though there’s more obvious emphasis on momentum, it’s pulled back from time to time to allow something more subtle to come through. The short-long motif running through it feels more meaningful here, and while the work as a whole is clearly stylistically divided, the total effect is compelling. It’s certainly the one symphony of Bacewicz’s worthy of much wider appreciation.
The weak point of the album is the 1949 Piano Concerto, featuring Peter Donohoe as soloist. There’s not a huge amount to distinguish it from the performance by the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra under Nicholas Collon with pianist Peter Jablonski, except that in that recording everyone seems to be having more fun. By contrast, this is a somewhat dour reading of an inconsequential piece, which only makes its lack of cogent ideas all the more apparent. There’s some interest to be gleaned from the way the melodic impulse is articulated in the slow movement. Oramo makes it seem like it’s feeling its way forward, with a nicely messy surge along the way, apropos of nothing. But the entire work just sounds equivocal and disinterested, and neither Donohoe, Oramo nor the BBC SO seem to know what to do with its bland material and aimless narrative.
Thankfully, the final work featured here is the 1962 Concerto for Large Symphony Orchestra, perhaps Bacewicz’s finest orchestral work, demonstrating what she was capable of when turning away from mere bangs and fireworks. What makes it so compelling is its mercurial nature, which Oramo makes a key feature. Is the opening Allegro subdued, cautious or jaunty? It doesn’t so much get into its stride as enter into a strange kind of push-pull flow; a tension point builds, passes into something quieter, then playful staccatos follow, after which – from nowhere – a slow lyrical line materialises, before returning us to somewhere similar to where we began. It’s all so spontaneous and shape-shifting.
The Largo is wondrous here, with the BBC SO conjuring up the most tantalising atmosphere, distant, pensive and remote. A music box is suggested, the strings glissando weirdly in response (like a confused shrug), before we pass through a sequence of such intensity it brings to mind Alban Berg. Its climax is fittingly askew, even pained, closing with a tilted discomfort redolent of Shostakovich. This is fabulous enough, but the third movement – marked Vivo (Giocoso) – is turned into something seemingly liquid, where the material and even the momentum itself slip-slide around and along. It’s an excellent continuation of the Adagio‘s uncertainty, exacerbated by the curious nature and direction of its more robust passages. It’s tempting to read that tempo indication as “Lively (joke!)”, as if Bacewicz didn’t really mean it seriously, and certainly Oramo’s interpretation responds more to the intrinsic qualities of the music than to a perceived need for speed. The forward motion, such as it is, keeps getting stuck in metric ruts anyway, and the way this performance focuses on its continual flowing and stalling, particularly at the end, is beautifully weird.
It makes one wonder: is the entire work all about the attempt to get some kind of momentum going? Or to put it another way, is it a synthesis of sorts, in which Bacewicz’s earlier twin modes of expression are here not contrasted or alternated but pushed into a new kind of interaction, producing a hybrid of the two? This performance suggests that that’s exactly what it is, with the final movement’s instruction Allegro non troppo becoming entirely moot. A strange pulse yields to a glimpse of line, whereupon the strings attempt to drive things forward only to be held up by the brass. The whole thing becomes a metric muddle, one that seems to be heading for a potentially massive swell to sort things out but ends up with the complete opposite, tiny traces of ideas in a sparse texture that recedes to almost nothing. Even though momentum does – finally – appear toward the end (for the first time since the opening movement) its questionable status is confirmed by the work’s denouement, less propelled along than sounding like a machine struggling to keep going.
The measured, thoughtful response that Oramo and the BBC Symphony Orchestra brings to this music is highly convincing. While the Piano Concerto becomes shrug-worthy here, that’s to a large extent down to the issues in the work itself. Yet Symphony No. 2 and the Concerto for Large Symphony Orchestra are powerfully persuasive; Bacewicz may have been a problematic, stylistically limited composer, but at her best she was capable of genuinely imaginative invention.
Released last month, Orchestral Works, Vol. 2 is available on SACD and download.
