It is the spring of 1937. Musical circles in Warsaw are still abuzz with talk of the recently concluded 3 rd Fryderyk Chopin Piano Competition, especially as one of the main prizes that year has gone to Witold Małcużyński, an alumnus of Józef Turczyński’s class at the Warsaw Conservatoire. Alongside Małcużyński, Józef Turczyński has spent the last four years nurturing another promising student, an 18-year-old called Weinberg (Polish: Wajnberg). Known as Moses in his official papers, he is nowadays more keen to go by the name of Mieczysław. It was this name he had used when he put his name to two mazurkas penned in 1933 and dedicated to “Professor Józef Turczyński”. Following the mazurkas, Mietek – the diminutive form of this typically Polish name that years later he would insist that others call him by – composed three more miniatures for violin and piano, and another small piece for solo piano. And now, in 1937, he has decided to compose a string quartet, that is a multi-movement piece for a larger line-up.
The Silesian Quartet sprang to international attention with it's award-winning recordings of chamber music by Grazyna Bacewicz. It's latest project - the complete quartets of Penderecki - was started in 2012, but not completed until January 2021. Presented chronologically, the works on the album take us on a journey from Penderecki's early avant-garde 'sonoristic' style of the 1960s - the first and second quartets - to the later neo-romantic style of the third and fourth quartets, composed in 2008 and 2016 respectively. Of all Penderecki's output, the Quartet for Clarinet and String Trio shows the strongest links to the chamber music of the nineteenth century. Penderecki was inspired to write the piece by the 1992 recording by the Emerson String Quartet and Mstislav Rostropovich of Schubert's String Quintet in C major, D 956. Here the Silesian Quartet is joined by the clarinetist Piotr Szymyslik.
For their debut release on Chandos, award winning Silesian Quartet presents the complete string quartets by Grayna Bacewicz. Bacewicz's life was conditioned by the political and military events of her time, making her works reflect not only traumas but also the stylistic shifting into twentieth-century music. These seven string quartets have withstood the test of time and showcase Bacewicz's understanding of all string instruments.
The award-winning Silesian quartet present a new album featuring two composers from Warsaw – Joachim Mendelson and Grażnya Bacewicz. After completing his music studies in Warsaw and Berlin, Joachim Mendelson moved to Paris in 1929, where he joined the Association des Jeunes Musiciens Polonais, a society founded in 1926 to facilitate the study, publication, and promotion of the works of young Polish composers. Bacewicz also received support from the Association, and from Paderewski, and studied in Paris with Nadia Boulanger. The associations’ aims included re-establishing a national musical life at the highest level back in Poland (after more than a century of joint occupation by Russia, Prussia, and Austria), and both composers returned to Warsaw and worked there until 1939.