Symphony No. 3

Henryk Górecki’s solemn yet uplifting Symphony No. 3, "Symphony of Sorrowful Songs", composed in 1976, was little known outside avant-garde music circles until a 1992 recording with soprano Dawn Upshaw struck a chord across the world, eventually selling over a million copies—a one-hit wonder at the intersection of classical and popular tastes. (Górecki never experienced the same commercial success again.) The three-movement symphony employs simple harmonies and scales, folk sources and heartrending texts sung in Polish—a departure from the postwar modernism in which Górecki had become ensconced. The first movement is an extended canon for strings that enter in groups—separated by the interval of a fifth—and drop out in reverse order, starting and ending with the basses. In the middle, a sustained note from the strings, with gentle harp strokes, introduces the soprano, whose stirring vocal lines are set to a 15th-century lamentation of Mary at the Holy Cross. That keening soprano is also at the heart of the second movement, with an unforgettable, mellifluous three-note motif. The words are a prayer written by a Polish girl on a Gestapo cell wall in Nazi-occupied Zakopane, in 1944. Opening with gently rocking strings in A minor, the concluding movement is set to a folk song from Opole in southern Poland in which a mother bemoans the cruel killing of her son. Toward the end, sudden changes between the minor and major mode intensify the emotional atmosphere. The comforting rocking motion continues, suggesting the cradling arms of motherly love and paradisiac arrival.