{"id":41789,"date":"2024-12-15T14:04:19","date_gmt":"2024-12-15T20:04:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.wlbott.com\/?p=41789"},"modified":"2024-12-15T14:04:19","modified_gmt":"2024-12-15T20:04:19","slug":"symphony-of-sorrowful-songs-background","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wlbott.com\/?p=41789","title":{"rendered":"Symphony of Sorrowful Songs: Background"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Henryk Miko\u0142aj G\u00f3recki<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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Henryk Miko\u0142aj G\u00f3recki ( 6 December 1933 \u2013 12 November 2010) was a Polish composer of contemporary classical music. According to critic Alex Ross, no recent classical composer has had as much commercial success as G\u00f3recki. He became a leading figure of the Polish avant-garde during the post-Stalin cultural thaw.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

His Anton Webern-influenced serialist works of the 1950s and 1960s were characterized by adherence to dissonant modernism and influenced by Luigi Nono, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Krzysztof Penderecki and Kazimierz Serocki. He continued in this direction throughout the 1960s, but by the mid-1970s had changed to a less complex sacred minimalist sound, exemplified by the transitional Symphony No. 2 and the Symphony No. 3 (Symphony of Sorrowful Songs). This later style developed through several other distinct phases, from such works as his 1979 Beatus Vir, to the 1981 choral hymn Miserere, the 1993 Kleines Requiem f\u00fcr eine Polka and his requiem Good Night.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

G\u00f3recki was largely unknown outside Poland until the late 1980s. In 1992, 15 years after it was composed, a recording of his Symphony of Sorrowful Songs with soprano Dawn Upshaw and conductor David Zinman, released to commemorate the memory of those lost during the Holocaust, became a worldwide commercial and critical success, selling more than a million copies and vastly exceeding the typical lifetime sales of a recording of symphonic music by a 20th-century composer. Commenting on its popularity, G\u00f3recki said, “Perhaps people find something they need in this piece of music … somehow I hit the right note, something they were missing. Something somewhere had been lost to them. I feel that I instinctively knew what they needed.”<\/p>\nWikipedia<\/a><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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Dawn Upshaw<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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Dawn Upshaw (born July 17, 1960) is an American soprano. She is the recipient of several Grammy Awards and has released a number of Edison Award-winning discs; she performs both opera and art song, and her repertoire spans Baroque to contemporary.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Many composers, including Henri Dutilleux, Osvaldo Golijov, John Harbison, Esa-Pekka Salonen, John Adams, and Kaija Saariaho, have written for her. In 2007, she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dawn Upshaw was born in Nashville, Tennessee. She began singing while attending Rich East High School in Park Forest, Illinois and was the only female ever promoted to the top choir (the Singing Rockets) as a sophomore, according to choir director Douglas Ulreich.<\/p>\nWikipedia<\/a><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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Helena Wanda B\u0142a\u017cusiak\u00f3wna<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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Helena Wanda B\u0142a\u017cusiak\u00f3wna<\/strong> (born 4 February 1926, died 25 July 1999) was a Polish girl whose prayer, scratched on a cell wall during arrest by Nazis in 1944, was set to music by Henryk G\u00f3recki in his Symphony No. 3 Sorrowful Songs.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

She was born in Szczawnica, a town in the far south of Poland only half a mile from the border with Slovakia, and was a member of the G\u00f3ral (“mountain dweller”) community, which spanned the border with Czechoslovakia in the Tatra mountains.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Eight weeks after her capture, on 22 November 1944, B\u0142a\u017cusiak\u00f3wna was being transported by the Nazis by train, and was one of 12 people rescued by guerrillas. She walked over the mountains to Nowy Targ, where she was given a skirt and a large scarf. That evening she was back with her grandparents in Szczawnica. She fell ill and spent the rest of the war in hospital, where the staff took great risks to treat her and hide her identity.<\/p>\nWikipedia<\/a><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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A biography of Helana can be found here: https:\/\/www.gosc.pl\/doc\/6457342.Lamentacja-twardej-Heleny<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

She was a brave young woman who fought in the underground resistance against the German occupiers.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

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The Success of Henryk Gorecki and Dawn Upshaw’s Recording<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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How a Somber Symphony Sold More Than a Million Records<\/strong>
In 1989, the record executive Robert Hurwitz attended a London performance of the Polish composer Henryk Gorecki\u2019s Symphony No. 3, subtitled \u201cSymphony of Sorrowful Songs.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI was just completely knocked out,\u201d he said in a recent interview. \u201cAnd somewhere in the first movement, I thought, well, Dawn should do this.\u201d He reached out to the young soprano Dawn Upshaw, who agreed to record the symphony with the conductor David Zinman and the London Sinfonietta for Mr. Hurwitz\u2019s label, Nonesuch.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201cI think a lot of people might like this,\u201d Mr. Hurwitz recalled thinking, \u201cand we might sell 25,000 or 30,000 copies.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>

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That turned out to be an understatement: Within a year of the album\u2019s release in April 1992, it was selling about 10,000 units per day<\/em>. Ultimately, Mr. Gorecki\u2019s Third sold over a million records, an extraordinary number for an album of contemporary classical music.<\/p>\nNew York Times<\/a><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Henryk Miko\u0142aj G\u00f3recki Dawn Upshaw Helena Wanda B\u0142a\u017cusiak\u00f3wna A biography of Helana can be found here: https:\/\/www.gosc.pl\/doc\/6457342.Lamentacja-twardej-Heleny She was a brave young woman who fought in the underground resistance against the German occupiers. The Success of Henryk Gorecki and Dawn Upshaw’s Recording<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[111,31,124],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-41789","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hopeful-songs-on-dismal-days","category-music","category-poland"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wlbott.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41789","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wlbott.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wlbott.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wlbott.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wlbott.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=41789"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.wlbott.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41789\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41807,"href":"https:\/\/www.wlbott.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41789\/revisions\/41807"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wlbott.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=41789"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wlbott.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=41789"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wlbott.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=41789"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}