Symphony No. 3, Op. 26/Symphony of Sorrowful Songs

Górecki, Henryk

Believe the Subtitle

Nothing much happens in the first few minutes of this work. We open in a pool of low-strings murk, and we stay there, stewing. It's as though the Polish composer Henryk Górecki is clearing his throat, insisting on a certain quality of attention. Or, perhaps, he's making sure the whole room reaches the proper gloomy frequency.

This stasis has an effect. When the sonorities do change, they have cataclysmic impact. Górecki organized the extended first movement as a series of overlapping "canons," or rounds, in which slow-moving motifs are layered over each other to create a counterpoint. It's a cerebral technique some-times used by minimalists, but Górecki lets the ideas emerge so gently, it hardly seems like a device at all—the dissonances that result carry their own emotional surges. The chords swell up one by one, gusts of wind announcing a gathering storm. When the voice enters, after thirteen minutes, things have swirled to a head; the grieving mother at the center of the work is finally heard. What had been indistinct atmosphere becomes jabbing weaponry behind her.

As the subtitle suggests, the texts are concerned with sorrow. Some are shrouded in religious pleas: The prayer in the second movement was found written on the wall of a Gestapo prison cell in Poland. When Dawn Upshaw, as the grief-stricken mom, digs into it on this recording, her request for help from the Blessed Virgin seems both desperate and futile, a necessary exercise in the long quest for "closure." The final movement again hits the somber tone of an ancient chant, even though this text appropriates a folk song for the mother's lament: "He lies in a grave, I know not where."

Górecki's masterwork premiered in 1976, and was well received though hardly a sensation. This recording became an unlikely global phenomenon in the early 1990s—selling so well it reached number 6 on the British pop albums chart. One theory about the decades-delayed response is that the world wasn't ready for such a dose of sad music in the middle '70s. But certainly some credit goes to this coloristic reading from conductor David Zinman, who lets the festering chordal schemes decay spectacularly, sweeping all within earshot into deep, inescapable sorrow.

Genre: Classical
Released: 1994, Nonesuch
Key Tracks: Second movement: Lento y Largo.
Catalog Choice: String Quartets Nos. 1 and 2, Kronos Quartet.
Next Stop: Arvo Pärt: Tabula rasa
After That: Louis Andriessen: De Staat.
Book Page: 319