Track listing
20 tracks · 71:17Listen to samples on selected tracks.
Grazyna Bacewicz
- 1 Concert Krakowiak (1949) 6:41
- Ten Concert Etudes (1956?57) 22:48
- 2 Etude No. 1: Allegro non troppo 2:35
- 3 Etude No. 2: Vivace 1:42
- 4 Etude No. 3: Allegro 2:34
- 5 Etude No. 4 1:35
- 6 Etude No. 5: Andante 3:25
- 7 Etude No. 6 2:06
- 8 Etude No. 7: Giocoso 1:59
- 9 Etude No. 8 3:22
- 10 Etude No. 9: Presto 1:36
- 11 Etude No. 10: Allegro 1:54
- Two Etudes on Double Notes (1955) 6:09
- 12 Moderato 3:21
- 13 Vivace 2:48
- Piano Sonata No. 1 (1949) 18:10
- 14 I. Moderato 5:43
- 15 II. Andante sostenuto 4:28
- 16 III. Scherzo 3:12
- 17 IV. Finale: Molto allegro 4:47
- Piano Sonata No. 2 (1953) 17:29
- 18 I. Maestoso. Agitato 6:47
- 19 II. Largo 7:06
- 20 III. Toccata: Vivo 3:36
About this recording
This album is pianist Peter Jablonski’s third solo album for the Ondine label. With this album Jablonski represents Grazyna Bacewicz’s (1909–1969) dazzling piano etudes and piano sonatas which are hardly known outside of her native Poland. Jablonski’s piano albums have received an enthusiastic response and his previous album release received Editor’s Choice from the Gramophone magazine.
In recent years the music of Grazyna Bacewicz has been enjoying an ever-increasing popularity in concert hall programmes. Bacewicz was a major Polish composer and a versatile musician: a child prodigy violinist, she was also an accomplished pianist. As a composer, she is known for her inventive, complex, and original musical language, and particularly many of her works for violin are well known. Bacewicz studied first at the Warsaw Conservatory and briefly continued her studies in Paris before returning back home. In 1934, she received a position of concertmaster at the Polish Radio Orchestra. This position proved invaluable to her as a composer, giving her insights into each instrument’s possibilities and orchestral composition. Her music displays many characteristic traits of the twentieth-century that are to be heard in the writings of Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Bartók, and Lutosławski, among others. Jablonski’s piano album covers only eight short years during which the works presented here were composed and brings together, for the first time, both piano sonatas, and both sets of etudes. Sonata No. 1 for solo piano was composed in 1949 but waited over seventy years until Peter Jablonski edited it for PWM for publication.
This album was co-organised together with the Adam Mickiewicz Institute as part of the international cultural programme marking the centenary of Poland’s regained independence. Financed by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage of the Republic of Poland as part of the multi-annual programme NIEPODLEGŁA 2017–2022.
Peter Jablonski is an internationally acclaimed Swedish pianist. Discovered by Claudio Abbado and Vladimir Ashkenazy and signed by Decca at the age of 17, he went on to perform, collaborate, and record with over 150 of the world’s leading orchestras and conductors, including the Philharmonia, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Leipzig Gewandhaus, Mariinsky, La Scala Philharmonic, Tonhalle Zurich, Orchestre Nationale de France, NHK Tokyo, DSO Berlin, Warsaw Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Philadelphia and Cleveland Orchestras, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Valery Gergiev, Kurt Sanderling, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Riccardo Chailly, Daniele Gatti, and Myung-Whun Chung, to name a few. He has performed and recorded the complete piano concertos by Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, and Bartók, and all piano sonatas by Prokofiev. Hailed as an ‘unconventional virtuoso’, during his three-decade-long career he developed a diverse and worked with composers Witold Lutosławski and Arvo Pärt. Jablonski’s extensive discography includes several award-winning recordings.
The recording is financed by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage of the Republic of Poland as part of the multi-annual programme NIEPODLEGŁA 2017–2022
Adam Mickiewicz Institute:
Features
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The artists
Peter Jablonski
Described by the Gramophone as 'a pianist in full flower of his mature, imaginative artistry' in 2022, Peter Jablonski is an award-winning internationally acclaimed Swedish artist. He is among the leading pianists of his generation, and during the last thirty years on international stages has performed with over 150 orchestras, given over 2000 concerts, and has been on 25 tours of Japan. Discovered by Abbado and Ashkenazy and signed by Decca in his seventeenth year, he went on to perform, collaborate, and record with many of the world’s leading orchestras and conductors, which include the BBC Symphony Orchestra, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra, Leipzig Gewandhaus, Kirov (now Mariinsky), La Scala Philharmonic, Tonhalle Zurich, Orchestre Nationale de France, NHK Tokyo, DSO Berlin, Warsaw Philharmonic, Philadelphia, Los Angeles Philharmonic, and Cleveland Orchestra, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Valery Gergiev, Andris Nelsons, Daniel Harding, Kurt Sanderling, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Jukka-Pekka Saraste, Riccardo Chailly, Daniele Gatti, and Myung-Whun Chung.
