GRAZYNA BACEWICZ (1909-1969): Complete String Quartets, Vol. 1 - String Quartets Nos. 1, 3, 6 and 7.

Description: The first quartet (1939) is an early work, unpublished and unacknowledged by the composer; it is full of youthful ardour and no small accomplishment in technique, though inevitably less individual than the later works. The Third of 1947 has a momentum and drive which makes it both tough and simultaneously readily comprehensible while the 1960 Sixth is perhaps the composer's most 'modern' sounding quartet, which she considered a turning-point in her compositional development. Although freely making intermittent use of dodecaphony, it is mainly through the exploration of sound and texture that this work breaks new ground in Bacewicz' output. Even late in her life, when Bacewicz wrote the Seventh in 1965, although well aware of the avant-garde processes afoot at the time, her writing never moved far in this direction, becoming somewhat more free in terms of its sonic signature, but always controlled by a sense of argument and structure. Lutoslawski String Quartet.