Grażyna Bacewicz's music will be the showpiece of the New London Orchestra's 20th anniversary gala concert in London on March 19. ORLA Classical and Radio ORLA FM are proud to be media patron for this event, which takes place at Cadogan Hall, Sloane Terrace London WC1X. More details please see our icon on the main page of this website or visit www.nlo.co.uk

Grażyna Bacewicz was born in Łódź in 1909 and was a Polish composter and violinist. She is only the second Polish female composer to have achieved national and international recognition, the first being Maria Szymanowska in the early 19th century.

In 1928 she began studying at the Warsaw Conservatory, where she initially took violin and piano classes, and graduated in 1932 as a violinist and composer. She continued her education in Paris, having been granted a stipendiary by Ignacy Jan Paderewski, the renowned pianist and former Polish Prime Minister, to attend the Ecole Normale de Musique, and studied there in 1932-33 under the guidance of Nadia Boulanger. At the same time she took private violin lessons with Henri Touret. Later she also left France in order to learn from the Hungarian violinist Carl Flesch.

After completing her studies, Bacewicz took part in numerous events as a soloist, composer, and jury member. During the 1930s, she was the principal violinist of the Polish Radio orchestra, which was directed then by Grzegorz Fitelberg. This position gave her the chance of hearing a lot of her own music. During World War II, Grażyna Bacewicz lived in Warsaw, continued to compose, and gave underground secret concerts (premiering her Suite for Two Violins).

She was married in 1936, and gave birth to a daughter, Alina Biernacka, a recognised painter. After the war, she took up the position of professor at the State Conservatory of Music in Łódź. At this time she was shifting her musical activity towards composition, tempted by her many awards and commissions, and it finally became her only occupation in 1954 after serious injuries in a car accident.