Henryk Mikolaj Górecki: Symphony No.3 (Symphony of Sorrowful Songs): Soprano:

Henryk Mikolaj Gorecki's career spans more than 40 years dating from the post-Stalinist era of the mid 1950s and embracing a catalogue of more than 70 acknowledged works. It was not however until the phenomenal success of histhird symphony Symphony of Sorrowful Songs Op 36 which brought the composer world-wide renown through its numerous performances and recordings that his music reached an extended audience outside his native Poland. Since thenthe directness and emotional impact of his music have established him as one of the major figures of contemporary music.

The unprecedented commercial success of the CD of Henryk Miko aj Góreckis Third Symphony in 1991 fifteen years after the date of its composition not only drew the Polish composer to the worlds attention arousing interest in his earlier works but also gave rise to a discussion about the state of culture in what might be described as a decadent period. So was the Third Symphony ahead of its time? Was it justifiable to regard the work as an end-of-the-seventies piece of aesthetical provocation? Should the wilful confusion of high and low aesthetic orders be considered a symbol of the end of post-Enlightenment utopia when the idea of progress in all fields including art constituted the fundamental criterion for evaluation? Attempts to answer these questions have given rise to a certain intellectual confusion leading occasionally to the advancing of false theses such as the attribution of Góreckis compositional output to the New Age spiritual landscape or the comparison of his compositional procedures with those of American minimalist composers. In fact the Third Symphony Symphony of Sorrowful Songs reflects both the composers individual exploration of technique and his attempt to determine his own Christian spiritual identity. The composition is a new manifestation of the sonoristic reductionism technique and the idea of simple music in line with Krzysztof Drobas designation of these phenomena according to which all details and modifications of tone colour are significant. By conferring on the three movements of the composition a form of mystery which negated a rational sense of time and made the work dissolve in a seemingly infinite continuum the composer managed to bring the Symphony within the sphere of folk ceremonial tradition. Anguish the principal theme of the composition presented here through both the mothers suffering after her sons death and the image of a woman prisoner in a Gestapo prison makes real sense only in the light of faith and the drama of Golgotha. Góreckis Third Symphony Symphony of Sorrowful Songs for soprano solo and orchestra dedicated to the composers wife was written in 1976. Commissioned by Südwestfunk in Baden-Baden it was premiered on 4 April 1977 during the 14th International Festival of Contemporary Art in Royan with Stefania Woytowicz as soloist. The same singer has made several recordings of the composition with different orchestras. The CD with Dawn Upshaw as soloist and the London Sinfonietta conducted by David Zinman won a Golden Disc award in 1991. The first movements outer sections (Lento sostenuto tranquillo ma cantabile) consist of an austere ten-part canon on strings. Its Aeolian theme was derived from a Kurpian song notated in Rev. Father W adys aw Skierkowskis collection. The canon is characterized by continual repetition of the theme (and its counterpoint) all its answers being tonal and thus not going beyond the notes of the scale. In this way a vibrating sound magma

The first part of Gorecki's remarkable cycle Genesis is a gritty and unforgiving exploration of pure sound and sonority. The strings are treated to a huge variety of effects and techniques including tremolandi glissandi bridge bowing and de-tuning. This approach creates an ever changing and fluctuating timbral journey that has more in common with the Fluxus school Gerard Grisey or even Edgard Varese than with the seminal Symphony of SorrowfulSongs. Music of the very elements themselves.