10 Etudes - Piano

Grażyna Bacewicz wrote Ten Studies for piano in 1956. Although she had a special predilection for the violin and frequently gave concerts as a violinist, with great success, her compositional output included a total of thirty piano pieces, many of which were performed by the composer herself in Warsaw or Paris. The whole cycle was intended as a continuation of the nineteenth-century cycles of educational and virtuoso pieces following the model of Chopin's and Liszt's etudes. In Bacewicz's studies, a role of considerable importance is entrusted to rhythm and metre and a recapitulation type of shaping the individual, highly varied, movements. As the composer herself attached great significance to precise interpretative instructions, she left in a letter to the famous pianist, Regina Smendzianka, who gave the first performance of the cycle in Cracow in 1957 - some examples of such instructions: ''the first study banged away; the second played with verve; the sixth at full speed and great tension; the tenth at top speed...''.