My favorite record of 2019—Beth Gibbons & The Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra’s Henryk Górecki: Symphony No. 3 (Symphony of Sorrowful Songs)—asks a lot of a listener in the third decade of the 21st century: patience, time (its 49 minutes are split into only three movements), uwaga (attention) and, for the critic, a reply worthy of the symphony’s emotional heft and historical gravity. This, originally published in the December 27, 2019 issue of the Inlander alt-weekly, is not that. To reduce the record to a paragraph of 100 words is wildly insufficient, perhaps even irresponsible. Nonetheless, voilà:
If ever a piece of art could encapsulate the ineluctable cocktail of horror, hope and sorrow de profundis that was the aftermath of World War II and the Holocaust, Polish composer Henryk Górecki’s 1976 masterpiece, Symphony No. 3 (“Symphony of Sorrowful Songs”), comes close. Krzysztof Penderecki’s take here—with Beth Gibbons of the experimental English pop group Portishead singing soprano across its three movements—is, in its sobering bleakness, transcendent, a revelatory concomitant of Shoah survivor Viktor Frankl’s observation: “Man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those chambers upright, with the Lord’s Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips.”
Image: Minton, John (Director). (2019). Beth Gibbons & the Polish National Radio Symphony – II. Lento e largo—Tranquillissimo [Video file]. Retrieved October 8, 2020, from https://www.youtube.com
Impolitic 