Whilst writing a piece about Beth Gibbons’ stunning 2024 song Floating On A Moment, this excellent concert video came my way (below).
I was told about The 3rd Symphony by Henryck Gorecki (1933-2010) in the early 2000’s and was immediately spell bound. An astonishing modern classical piece composed in 1976 whose defining rendition has been 1979’s recording with Dawn Upshaw (Soprano) And The London Sinfonietta (conducted by David Zinman).
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In the years since Portishead last released material, Gibbons has been involved in many interesting projects, including collaborating on the 2002 album Out Of Season with Talk Talk bassist Rustin Man (aka Paul Webb) which yielded both the brilliant and haunting Mysteries (below) as well as the stunning and stunningly arranged and orchestrated Tom The Model.
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3rd Symphony
As per wikipedia it “represented a stylistic breakthrough: austerely plaintive, emotionally direct and steeped in medieval modes… The dominant themes of the symphony are motherhood, despair and suffering“. It is interesting to read about Goerecki’s journey from dissonant serialist in the early part of his career, to his later melodic work that drew correspondence with the work of Arvo Pärt and John Tavener.
Also of note the relation in its composition with Polish folk music, while sonically its coruscating, searing strings, as powerful surely as anything that’s been composed in this form. Building slowly and relentlessly like a tide, it is the ocean of sadness, the grief and horror turned into the beautiful vast cosmic wave of sadness.
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In the above context to suddenly see reference to Beth Gibbons as soprano on Gorecki’s symphonic masterpiece was thrilling. There is such an obvious resonance to Gibbons’ amazing expressive voice in this high point of modern sonic culture.
Recorded in 2019, it is testament to the massive popularity of the piece, released by UK indie / alternative label Domino and conducted by the Polish modern classical composition luminant Krzysztof Penderecki (in the last year before he died) along with the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra.
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In terms of the composition, one thing that rings recurrently through the Wikipedia entry for this symphony is just how much critics have recurrently gone after it, including harshly on its debut (when a French musician suggested as being Pierre Boulez cried out that it was ‘shit’ at its’ denouement). Even after it had gone on to become a phenomenal success on CD and vinyl (selling over a million copies) they still questioned why it had been so successful, speculating on whether it was just a fad of some kind.
This seems to have been informed partly by the use of repetition in its structure and by the notion that Gorecki had abandoned the avant garde and its compositional conceits and concerns. On how to miss the point..? For a piece that has gone onto to have a huge impact throughout the realms of artists and people of all descriptions, or as Gorecki himself said ‘…Somehow I hit the right note, something they [people] were missing. Something, somewhere had been lost to them. I feel that I instinctively knew what they needed.’
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