the Silesian String Quartet. Photograph: Karolina Salajczyk
The Silesian String Quartet add to their outstanding survey on Chandos of the chamber music of Grażyna Bacewicz, this time pairing it with that of her little-known contemporary Joachim Mendelson. Both composers found their feet in Warsaw before plunging into the creative whirlwind of Paris. Both returned to Poland in the 1930s to help establish a modern music movement in their home country. Bacewicz survived the Nazi occupation. Mendelson, who was Jewish and had a form of dwarfism, did not – he was killed in the Warsaw Ghetto, shot by a member of the Gestapo.
