Gorecki

Polish composer Henryk Górecki, whose popularity exploded after the success of his Third Symphony, had an interest in and talent for chamber music throughout his long career. It was the Kronos Quartet that provided the impetus and was to commission and premiere each of the composer's three string quartets. Like any of Górecki's works, inspiration is drawn from composers of the past (particularly Beethoven), literary verse, and Polish folk music. Górecki transforms each of these muses into works of his own unique musical language that purposefully explores dissonance, contrasting textures and rhythms, and extremes of both dynamics and tempo. This Hyperion album brings together the three string quartets …..

Mike D. Brownell @ allmusic

Górecki, Pärt, Pelēcis, Vasks - Into Silence - Tamara-Anna Cislowska & TSO (2017) {ABC Classics Official Digital Download}
FLAC (tracks) - 16bit/44kHz - Official Digital Download (prestoclassical.co.uk) -> 349 Mb | MP3 @320 -> 218 Mb | Artwork | 5% repair rar
© 2017 ABC Classics | 481 6295
Classical / Modern Classical / Baltic Composers

This new recording from Australian label ABC Classics presents beautiful piano music by Vasks, Gorecki, Part and Pelecis - some of it with orchestra, some of it solo piano. The Pelecis concerto that opens the album is almost completely unknown, and stunning. Tamara-Anna Cislowska’s recordings have won, amongst others, the 2015 ARIA Award for Best Classical Album and Gramophone Magazine Editor’s Choice.

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.

I well remember reviewing one of the first recordings, possibly the first in the West, of Górecki's hypnotising 3rd Symphony (Stefania Woytowicz with the Berlin Radio Symphony orchestra, conducted by Wlodzimierz Kamirski (Schwann CD 11615 (Koch-Schwann SCH 361-302)). I can remember my excitement at such a simple, yet moving, work. These folksong arrangements are in the same mould as the Symphony – slow and quiet, simple and direct. They are very beautiful. They’re neither as complex, nor as demanding, as either Szeroka Woda (Broad Waters), op.39 (1979) or Wislo moja, Wislo szara (My Vistula, Grey Vistula), op.46 (1981), but in their own way they are affecting ………This is a most interesting and satisfying disk and it’s good to hear such fine choral singing.

Bob Briggs@musicweb-international

Górecki Ahead music album is an attempt to read the legacy of Henryk Mikołaj Górecki in a new way and show it in a different light than before. This record also proves how vital and inspiring is Górecki's music today, especially if its interpretations are undertaken by artists whose instrumental skills go hand in hand with creativity, imagination and the need to create an original artistic expression. Henryk Mikołaj Górecki is one of the greatest and most famous 20th-century composers. He owes his unusual popularity to the Symphony composed in 1976. Paradoxically, despite achieving success on a global scale, the composer's entire output remains virtually unknown to a wider audience…

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.