Symphony of Sorrowful Songs: ‘The greatest in Górecki’s highly effective music’

The Polish composer Henryk Górecki (1933-2010) was first acclaimed as a contemporary serialist within the dissonant type of Schönberg and Webern however on the Nineteen Seventies modified to a standard classical type, extra Schubert than Schönberg.

His Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, scored for an orchestra and one soprano was written in 1976, receiving its première the next 12 months however was scarcely seen outdoors Poland till the mid-Eighties and Nineteen Nineties when passages from it began appearing in movie soundtracks and even tv adverts.

Recordings of it bought greater than one million copies, which was greater than another up to date classical album within the US or UK.

The three actions of the Symphony are every primarily based on a poetic work: a fifteenth century Polish lament by the Virgin Mary; an inscription by an 18-year-old woman on the wall of a Gestapo jail cell in Poland in 1944; and a Silesian folks tune written round 1920 a few mom trying or her misplaced son.

I’ve at all times felt that some of the remarkably features of orchestra music is its capacity to painting pure emotion, free of a selected context. Sombre music evokes disappointment with out struggling.

For that purpose, I’ve at all times been suspicious of makes an attempt to stage musical works that weren’t written for that objective.

When that is performed with sensitivity, nonetheless, it may be very efficient and that’s what Isabella Bywater has achieved with Górecki’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs.

The American soprano Nicole Chevalier sings the poems, all in Polish, with a fantastically clear voice, whether or not she is writhing on the bottom with sepulchral figures, hoisted excessive into the air on a chair from which she dives downwards, or given a pair of wings which carry her heavenwards.

With all the opposite characters silently depicting useless or sepulchral figures, the manufacturing successfully illustrates the music with out ever distracting from it. 

The music and sombre nature of the piece might not be to everybody’s style, however that is the primary time the Symphony of Sorrowful Songs has been staged and the ENO is to be congratulated on a manufacturing that brings out the most effective in Górecki’s highly effective music.