This second volume of Sakari Oramo’s Bacewicz series features three rarely recorded works, played with conviction by the BBC Symphony Orchestra, and featuring Peter Donohoe as the soloist in the Piano Concerto. Grażyna Bacewicz was a pioneering twentieth-century Polish composer, known for her vibrant and dynamic musical language.

Her music bridges the gap between neoclassicism and modernism, and is extremely well crafted. The Concerto for Piano and Orchestra was written in 1949 in response to the Frederic Chopin Composers’ Competition announced by the Polish Composers’ Union to commemorate the centenary of Chopin’s death. In the category of works for piano and orchestra it received the second prize – no first prize was awarded at all!

The Second Symphony, finished in January 1951, was performed for the first time at the opening of the First Festival of Polish Music later that year. It is in fact the composer’s third symphony, Bacewicz having discarded the first one. She described her four-movement, perfectly balanced work as referring to the tradition of the great classical masters and encompassing her own musical discoveries. Her Concerto for Large Symphony Orchestra was written a decade later, in 1962. Bacewicz herself regarded the work as part of the evolutionary process that led to the third stage of her compositional path.