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Good. Providing great media since 1972. All used discs are inspected and guaranteed. Cases may show some wear. We ship orders daily and Customer Service is our top priority!
Choose your shipping method in Checkout. Costs may vary based on destination.
Seller's Description:
Very good. Providing great media since 1972. All used discs are inspected and guaranteed. Cases may show some wear. We ship orders daily and Customer Service is our top priority!
Choose your shipping method in Checkout. Costs may vary based on destination.
Seller's Description:
Very good. Providing great media since 1972. All used discs are inspected and guaranteed. Cases may show some wear. We ship orders daily and Customer Service is our top priority!
Choose your shipping method in Checkout. Costs may vary based on destination.
Seller's Description:
Very good. Providing great media since 1972. All used discs are inspected and guaranteed. Cases may show some wear. We ship orders daily and Customer Service is our top priority!
Choose your shipping method in Checkout. Costs may vary based on destination.
Seller's Description:
Very good. Providing great media since 1972. All used discs are inspected and guaranteed. Cases may show some wear. We ship orders daily and Customer Service is our top priority!
I attended a performance by the National Philharmonic at Strathmore Hall outside Washington, D.C. It was my first orchestral concert since the beginning of the pandemic. The program included Henryk Gorecki's Symphony No. 3, "Symphony of Sorrowful Songs" conducted by the Philharmonic's long time conductor, Piotr Gajewski, who offered a perceptive introduction to the work, together with the beautiful Metropolitan Orchestra soprano, Aleksandra Kurzak performing the sorrowful songs. It was a beautiful, appropriate way to return to live orchestral music.
Together with the live performance, I listened again to this 1994 Naxos CD of the Gorecki Third Symphony with Antoni Wit conducting the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra with soprano Zofia Kilaowicz. It was an outstanding way to hear the symphony and to enhance my appreciation of the live performance. Several excellent recordings of this music are available for those wanting to hear the piece, and this recording is among them.
The Symphony of Sorrowful Songs is one of the rare works of contemporary classical music that has achieved widespread, almost notorious, popularity. Composed in 1976, it came into popular consciousness more than a decade later. Much of Gorecki's earlier writing had been in a difficult serialist style. This symphony abandoned serialist music for an atavistic, primitive simplicity. It features basic, repeated and simple notes, harmonies, and figurations which gain in intensity with repetition and variety among the instruments of the orchestra. The symphony is in three slow movements, each marked "Lento" but with variations in mood and pulse throughout.
The tone of the symphony is sorrowful indeed but it lacks a specific programme or reference to a particular event. The three sorrowful songs include a 15th Century lament from the Virgin to her Son, a prayer of a young woman imprisoned by the Gestapo, and a folk song from a mother whose son had been killed in war. The vocal line for the songs are full of lament and sadness with a ray of hope. The songs are surrounded by the simple, dense orchestral score.
This Symphony is heavily religious in tone with its throwbacks to an earlier musical idiom. Its simplicity and its anguish speak to contemporary listeners particularly in these difficult days of pandemic, dissension and war. Keith Anderson's 1994 liner notes to the CD references the symphony's "peculiar relevance to the mood of today, its anxieties, sorrows, and hopes." I was moved to hear the symphony live for the first time in the performance by the National Philharmonic. I was also moved to hear the symphony again on this CD which has long been part of my collection. I was glad to hear the Symphony of Sorrowful Songs live and on recording and to share my thoughts briefly in this review.
