Pioneering twentieth-century Polish composer Grażyna Bacewicz’s vibrant and dynamic musical language bridges the gap between neoclassicism and modernism. This second volume of conductor Sakari Oramo’s Bacewicz series features three rarely recorded works. The Concerto for Piano and Orchestra was written in 1949 for the Frédéric Chopin Composers’ Competition, organized 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. 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. Both the symphony and orchestra concerto are new to the WFMT library.