(Instrumentation: 2 flutes, piccolo, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, bass clarinet, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, cymbals, bass drum, snare drum, triangle, glockenspiel, strings)
Grażyna Bacewicz
(Born in Łódź, Poland in 1909; died in Warsaw in 1969)
Overture
Polish violin virtuoso, teacher, and composer Grażyna Bacewicz was born into a musical family that cherished the arts. Her first teacher was her father, and by the age of 13, Bacewicz was composing. Despite the gender conventions of the day, Bacewicz was determined to be a professional composer, and in fact, felt that it was her destiny. After she graduated from the Warsaw Conservatory, the great Polish piano virtuoso and statesman, Ignacy Jan Paderewski arranged a scholarship in 1932 for Bacewicz to study in Paris with Nadia Boulanger. Thereafter, Bacewicz returned to Poland where she remained during her country’s terrible years of WWII and the ensuing Russian occupation. Although her reputation was huge in Poland, few in the West knew much of her until the Iron Curtain fell. It seems that only recently is Bacewicz being given her due outside of Eastern Europe.
In her short but prolific 59 years of life, she created well over two hundred compositions, most notably: seven string quartets, five sonatas for violin and piano, 12 concertos (seven of them for violin), four symphonies, plus dozens of works for chamber and full orchestra. And this output was no small feat during the troubled times of the early 20th Century. Two world wars would interrupt her life, and other tragedies, including a terrible car accident resulting in a lengthy hospital recovery in 1959 that plagued her health through her last decade.
Bacewicz’s works are often exuberantly positive, rhythmically frolicsome, and filled with a kind-of intelligent merriment that belies the tragedies in the world around her and in her own life. Such is the case with her Overture, written in 1943, firmly in the middle of a Poland gone horribly tragic in WWII. During that time, while Bacewicz nursed her war-wounded sister, and as the rest of her family was moved into a concentration camp in Pruszków, Bacewicz composed several exceptional works, including her Overture. It had its premiere almost immediately after the end of the war, in 1945, and it won her a solid place among Polish composers.
Bacewicz crafted her dazzling Overture in three sections, with two hyper-energetic outer sections enveloping a lyrical, almost elegiac, central section. The outer sections are giddy with energy, filled with driving rhythms and excitement. Each seems a near perpetual-motion machine, as the orchestra only occasionally halts for a breath. The middle section, however, is the opposite: It creates a perfect balance for its bookends, but perhaps more importantly, brings us a moment of necessary reflection and lack of jubilance – after all, in 1943, Bacewicz was composing during some of the darkest days that the world has ever been through.
The instrument pairings are consistent throughout the quick sections, and they are, almost, delightfully backwards with regard to convention. The timpani, which traditionally accompanies brass instruments, here is often paired with the strings – the opening bars of the Overture are the first example of this, as the timpani and strings have vivid call-and-response. In contrast, the woodwinds and brass, individually, are often their own voices, making conversation with each other and with the strings/percussion. Listen for the jangling of various motives throughout the whole work – Bacewicz has these motives whirl between various instrumental groups like manic, jumping mice. By the last fifty bars or so, too, the entire orchestra is called to play with almost overwhelming energy and virtuosity. After the very last bars flee past us, you may have to pry your grip loose from your armrests to applaud.
A note: Many musicians have remarked on the opening motive played in the timpani (and subsequently by many of the other instruments throughout the Overture): three short, repeated notes descending to a fourth (longer) note. The resemblance to Beethoven’s opening motive in his Fifth Symphony is strong. Additionally, however, the Morse Code “rhythm” for the letter ‘V’ is this same sequence: “· · · –” which stood for ‘Victory’ for the Allied nations in WWII. Musicologists have reflected on whether this was Bacewicz’s message to her Resistance compatriots against the invading Nazi’s, but we should remember that the Poland-occupying Third Reich also used this same Beethoven’s Fifth musical motive to announce, through broadcast and film, their own victories and grand plans. Bacewicz was silent on the matter, but it’s enticing to imagine that in the depths of the War, it was her coded message of hope in this wonderfully upbeat and optimistic Overture.
© Max Derrickson
