Bacewicz Cello Concertos – Krzeszowiec and Koziak

Poland’s musical life in the middle of the last century produced no figure quite like her — violinist, composer, wartime survivor, a woman who wrote symphonies and quartets while the world around her insisted she stay in her lane as a fiddler. Grazyna Bacewicz never fully got her due outside Warsaw and Lodz, and recordings like this one make the neglect look like malpractice.

The two cello concertos, composed a dozen years apart, sit on either side of a stylistic fault line. Cello Concerto No. 1, from 1951, is Bacewicz still working comfortably within a neoclassical idiom she’d absorbed from Paris — she studied there with Nadia Boulanger in the 1930s, and you can hear the discipline in every clean-edged phrase. But this is no dry academic exercise. The first movement moves with a spring-loaded energy, motoric rhythms ticking along under lines that keep threatening to break into something more lyrical. Adam Krzeszowiec plays the solo part with a burnished, unfussy tone, though I wanted a touch more abandon in the bigger gestures — the wide leaps and astringent double-stops that Bacewicz clearly wrote to unsettle.

The slow movement is where the piece earns its keep. Soloist and orchestra trade fragments across pools of silence, real silence, the kind that makes an audience hold its breath, before the cello opens into an extended elegiac monologue that Krzeszowiec shapes with real feeling. Not quite the last ounce of vulnerability a Rostropovich might have found, but close. The finale turns folk-inflected and dance-driven, occasionally slipping into a lush, almost cinematic harmonic language. This was, after all, a composer who also wrote film scores, and you can hear the crossover.

Cello Concerto No. 2 is a different animal entirely. By 1963 Bacewicz had absorbed the sonorist experiments coming out of the Warsaw Autumn festival. Not full serialism; she was too pragmatic a composer for orthodoxies. But there is a new interest in texture and color for their own sake. Percussion pushes forward here in ways unthinkable in the earlier work. Motor rhythms give way to sharper, more granular effects: glassy sul ponticello passages, brass that snarls rather than sings. Bartosz Koziak digs into this material with evident relish. His tone turns harder, drier, when the writing calls for it, and the give-and-take with woodwinds and percussion in the second movement has a nervous, glinting quality that keeps pulling the ear forward.

Monika Wolinska, conducting the second concerto, seems the more instinctively attuned of the two conductors on this disc to Bacewicz’s sound-world. She lets the sonorities bloom without smoothing off their edges. George Tchitchinadze, in the earlier concerto and the brisk 1943 Overture, is efficient rather than illuminating. The Sinfonia Iuventus players are young and it shows, mostly in a certain caution in the string sound, though the winds and brass have real character where Bacewicz gives them room.

Does this album unseat existing versions — the Chandos discs with Kirshbaum, or the older Polish accounts on CD Accord? Not decisively. But it doesn’t need to. What it offers is a persuasive, well-engineered introduction to a composer who deserves far wider currency than she has, two concertos that between them sketch the arc of a whole career compressed into forty minutes. Worth hearing. Worth owning, frankly, if you don’t already have Bacewicz on your shelves. Most collections, still, do not.