I can’t listen to Górecki’s Symphony #3 very frequently, it’s just too affecting. But I pulled it out this evening for a listen. It’s just so incredibly moving. It reminded me that I first heard it performed by the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra over 10 years ago and was mightily impressed with the work, to the point that I posted this about it on my FB page:
“What a terrific ISO concert last night. An all-Polish program with some rare commentary from the Maestro, audience percussion participation, a virtuosic turn at the Szymanowski concerto by our own amazing concertmaster Zach De Pue, and of course, what I viewed as the centerpiece of the event, Henryk Górecki’s Symphony #3, ‘Symphony of Sorrowful Songs.’
“The piece started almost imperceptibly in the basses, quietly playing simple, slow figures of what sounded like no more than 2 or 3 notes, repeatedly, and in time it spreads to the cellos, violas and violins in turn, not playing in unison, but also not in rounds, strictly speaking, until it becomes a minor-key mass of harmony in a long, slow crescendo. I’m guessing the only thing that keeps it from sounding jumbled, as the amplitude increases with the quantity of players and their individual volumes rise, is the fact that with such few notes in the figures being played that there’s little chance of dissonance or disharmony. This plaintive minor-key crescendo continues until about halfway through the first movement when it all resolves to a single note (E?), as the string sections drop out in turn, much as they joined in the beginning, until those left playing are on that single note, which is then reinforced by the playing of the same, single note on the piano at a dirge-like tempo.
“It’s on that backdrop that the soprano comes in. The part was sung by Shara Worden, also known to the avant-garde pop world as My Brightest Diamond (I am not part of that world, and didn’t know her). She sang the text in Polish, which was fine with me – the translation was projected in superscript on a high screen behind the orchestra. In some ways, not being able to associate known words with the sounds coming from her throat made it easier for me to appreciate the raw emotion of her voice, and the hard objectivism of the simple blocks of sans-serif text on the screen belied the horror of the events from which the text sprang. It was like we were being given moral instruction by a ghost, on a field in the aftermath of a battle. The orchestra joins again in the groundswell until another climax, after which it ends much like it began.
“This post is long enough already that I won’t go into detail on the rest of the piece, except to offer a little info on the texts. The first and third movements deal with a mother’s loss of her son. The second, and to me the most chilling of the three, contain the last words known to have come from 18-year old WWII prisoner Wanda Blazusiakowna, said to have been found inscribed on the wall of her cell in the basement of the Gestapo headquarters in Zakopane: ‘No, Mother, do not weep/Most chaste Queen of Heaven/Support me always.” Pretty devastating.
“And for those who want a little redemption in their evening, I know I heard a couple of moments where all the misery resolved in major chords.”
