Symphony of Sorrowful Songs: ‘The best in Górecki’s powerful music’

The Polish composer Henryk Górecki (1933-2010) was first acclaimed as a modern serialist in the dissonant style of Schönberg and Webern but on the 1970s changed to a traditional classical style, more Schubert than Schönberg.

His Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, scored for an orchestra and one soprano was written in 1976, receiving its première the following year but was scarcely noticed outside Poland until the mid-1980s and 1990s when passages from it began to appear in film soundtracks and even television adverts.

Recordings of it sold more than a million copies, which was more than any other contemporary classical album in the US or UK.

The three movements of the Symphony are each based on a poetic work: a 15th century Polish lament by the Virgin Mary; an inscription by an 18-year-old girl on the wall of a Gestapo prison cell in Poland in 1944; and a Silesian folk song written around 1920 about a mother looking or her lost son.

I have always felt that one of the most remarkably aspects of orchestra music is its ability to portray pure emotion, freed from a particular context. Sombre music evokes sadness without suffering.

For that reason, I have always been suspicious of attempts to stage musical works that were not written for that purpose.

When this is done with sensitivity, however, it can be very effective and that is 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 beautifully clear voice, whether she is writhing on the ground with sepulchral figures, hoisted high into the air on a chair from which she dives downwards, or given a pair of wings which carry her heavenwards.

With all the other characters silently depicting dead or sepulchral figures, the production effectively illustrates the music without ever distracting from it. 

The music and sombre nature of the piece may not be to everyone’s taste, but this is the first time the Symphony of Sorrowful Songs has been staged and the ENO is to be congratulated on a production that brings out the best in Górecki’s powerful music.