The Symphony of Sorrowful Songs

My work shift ends at midnight and I waste no time getting to my car and skedaddling on home...Fred Flintstone would be proud of me.  During my eight-mile drive I listen to the radio, my favorite station being on 102.7, which plays classical music here in Gainesville.  After midnight they tend to play shorter pieces and excerpts from longer ones...some of them with vocals, to my annoyance.  One night last week I was listening on my way home and one of these was on the air...but it had a completely different effect on me.  The woman's singing was slow, haunting, and sad...no way was I going to switch to a different station.  Afterwards the announcer said that it was the second movement of the late Polish composer Henryk Górecki's Third Symphony, also known as the Symphony of Sorrowful Songs.  This 1976 composition has three movements, all of which I have subsequently heard...each one features a different "sorrowful song", all performed by the same soloist in Polish.  The first song is a lament of Mary, mother of Jesus.  The second, which I first heard that night driving home, is of a girl's prayer written on the wall of a concentration camp during World War II asking for her family.  And the third is of a mother searching for her lost soldier son during the Silesian Uprising in eastern Germany immediately following World War I.  All three involve the separation of families and their longing to be reunited...the last two are a searing indictment of war, something that easily comes to my mind on this 72nd anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima...

Górecki's Third Symphony, musically speaking, is relatively simple even to my untrained, amateur ears...but the slow buildup at the beginning and the repetitiveness at its close somehow enhance the experience of the mournful singing in the middle.  It is around 55 minutes in length, a good span for a CD recording.  In fact, when a recording of  Górecki's masterpiece was released in 1992, it set all kinds of records in sales for classical music.  But until that night last week I had never heard of it...now I understand that part of it was put on the soundtrack for the superhero movie Suicide Squad...

I don't have as extensive a listening experience with classical music as I do with rock, and I'm confident that a lot of folks out there could compile a much more comprehensive list of classical greats, many of which I am unfamiliar with.  But I still have my own list of favorites, which I plan to put out on this blog in a couple of days.  And rest assured: the Symphony of Sorrowful Songs will be very highly placed on it...