Gorecki Symphony No. 3

This album, which catapulted Polish composer Henryk Gorecki to into the international spotlight, takes texts born in pain and turns them into statements of affirmation through the use of music that ebbs and flows in mystic minimalism. The clear voice of soprano Dawn Upshaw, singing the Polish texts, is a large part of the success of this particular recording, but the music, contemporary without either dissonance or movie-music mawkishness, clarifies and uplifts the words. This is a moving and essential element of the modern repertoire.

Composed in 1976, Górecki’s Symphony No. 3, “Symphony of Sorrowful Songs,” describes the anguished, raw pain of separation and death with music of a timeless, almost primitive quality. Its performance demands an emotional directness from both orchestra and soprano soloist, and the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Krzysztof Penderecki, is in searing form alongside the fragile, unvarnished voice of Beth Gibbons, singer of UK trip-hop pioneers Portishead. Gibbons intones the tragedy of each movement with an earthbound purity and honesty, and her voice carries aloft the almost unbearably powerful second movement. That this is a live recording makes her performance all the more impressive.

Górecki's Third Symphony has become legend. Composed in 1976, it's always had its champions and admirers within the contemporary music world, but in 1993 it found a new audience of undreamt-of proportions. A few weeks after its release, this Elektra Nonesuch release not only entered the top 10 in the classical charts, but was also riding high in the UK Pop Album charts. It became the biggest selling disc of music by a contemporary classical composer.

Henryk Mikolaj Gorecki (1933–2010) achieved an international success in the mid-1990s, with his Symphony No. 3, “Symphony of Sorrowful Songs”. Since then, Gorecki’s name has been associated almost exclusively with this piece. However, his music is much more than this one brilliant work. Gorecki never looked at musical fashions, but consistently created his own sound universe. In the 1980s Gorecki, feeling misunderstood, stepped back from the official concert life in Poland. He reached out to simple folk and church melodies, making their choral arrangements.

The Concert Overture is a hugely gifted young composer's homage to Richard Strauss, and fully worthy of its model in impetuousness, rich sonority and close-woven polyphony. The Second Symphony is no less rich but more disciplined, with Reger's influence added to (and modifying) that of Strauss, and with Szymanowski's own high colouring, sinuous melody and tonal adventurousness now in their first maturity. The Infatuated Muezzin songs are a high point of his middle period, Debussian harmony and florid orientalising arabesques fusing to an aching voluptuousness, colour now applied with the refinement of a miniaturist.

2013 limited edition 100 CD box set on the premiere classical label Deutsch Grammophon. Subtitled from Gregorian Chant to Gorecki.
• It starts with Gregorian Chant and Machaut chansons and ends with Gorecki and the Minimalists.
• The greatest composers have as many as five CDs devoted to them (Bach, Mozart, Beethoven);
• 20th-century music is well represented with no fewer than 20 CDs.
• Operas and major choral works are represented by highlights, but otherwise the edition presents, as far as possible, only complete works throughout.
• Altogether, there are more than 80 composers in the set, with over 400 works for a total of around 120 hours of music.

Known worldwide for his Symphony No. 3, 'Symphony of Sorrowful Songs', Polish composer Henryk Górecki enjoys an exceptionally high profile as a composer of contemporary music. Now the Molinari Quartet has chosen to explore Górecki's chamber works with this new recording of his complete string quartets. Each quartet bears a descriptive title. The first, 'Juz sie zmierzcha [Already dusk is falling]', is named after the opening line of a motet by a Polish Renaissance composer. The second, 'Quasi una fantasia', invokes Beethoven, acknowledged by Górecki himself as his muse for his first two string quartets. The title of the third quartet,… songs are sung, comes from a line by the Russian poet Velimir Khlebnikov.