“I believe this is the most brilliant woman composer who ever was.” So says conductor Mariusz Smolij about Grazyna Bacewicz.
Smolij, known in the Greater Delaware Valley as Music Director of the Riverside Symphonia, based in Lambertville, NJ, joins me this week on “The Lost Chord,” for the second installment in a two-part series, to talk about his recording projects for the Naxos label. His recorded repertoire focuses on neglected music by Eastern European composers, from Hungary, from his native Poland, and, in the case of Ernest Bloch, from Jewish tradition.
Bacewicz, who lived from 1909 to 1969, studied at the Warsaw Conservatory and then in Paris with Nadia Boulanger. She is a most interesting, Janus-like figure, her music embracing a kind of cosmopolitan neo-classicism, but not at the expense of her Polish heritage. She was an adept violinist and pianist, who survived a serious automobile accident that allowed her to concentrate wholly on composition for the last 15 years of her life. She remained energetic and prolific, also writing novels, short stories and memoirs. Though she is sometimes classified as a musical conservative, she retained her curiosity in regard to new developments in composition and was always on the lookout for ways to expand her horizons as an artist. She composed four symphonies, 12 concertos, chamber and instrumental works, opera and ballet, incidental music and film scores.
Smolij, who has directed the Riverside Symphonia for over 20 years, is also music director of the Acadiana Symphony Orchestra and Conservatory of Music in Lafayette, LA, and formerly associated with the Houston Symphony Orchestra and the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra. He has taught conducting at the School of Music at Northwestern University and was a founding violinist of the internationally acclaimed Penderecki String Quartet.
Only I would elect to highlight music by a great woman composer on Father’s Day. Consider it payback for the year I did an Odysseus show on Mother’s Day!
I hope you’ll join me for “Topping the Poles” – Mariusz Smolij’s recordings of Grazyna Bacewicz, first lady of Polish music – this Sunday night at 10 EDT, with a repeat Wednesday evening at 6; or listen to it later as a webcast at wwfm.org.
PHOTOS: Mariusz Smolij (left) and Grazyna Bacewicz
