Górecki - best known contemporary Polish composer

[tufta]

There's no occasion to post this special music. Maybe only this one - that I lately found the clip. The words are taken from the message carved on the prison wall in Zakopane by a young girl, during German occupation. A warning - one needs special mood to contemplate this music by Polish contemporary composer Henryk Górecki. Kind of prayer mood...

pl.youtube.com/watch?v=miLV0o4AhE4

[Bonobo]

Composer Górecki dies aged 76
12.11.2010 12:28


Henryk Mikołaj Górecki; photo - PAP

Henryk Mikołaj Górecki, one of the most celebrated contemporary composers, died this morning in a Katowice hospital after a protracted illness.

"This is a large blow not only for our orchestra but for the whole of Polish culture,” Joanna Wnuk-Nazarowa, director of the National Polish Radio Symphony Orchestra in Katowice, musicians who the composer was closely associated with told the PAP news agency.

"This is a great loss,” agrees Antoni Wit, director of Poland’s National Philharmonic. “Many times when I travel abroad I am asked to include one of his works in the programme.”

He would be aged 77 in three weeks’ time. The announcement was made at 11.30 by Polish Radio 2, which interrupted its regular programming and continued with the Third Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, the work which made Gorecki world famous in the early 1990s.

Last month, Górecki received the Order of the White Eagle, Poland’s highest state distinction.

Born in the village of Czernica near Rydułtowy in Silesia in 1933, he started studying music at the age of 19. Three years later he enrolled at the State Higher School of Music in Katowice to study composition with Boleslaw Szabelski.

In the mid-1950s - at the time of the post-Stalinist cultural thaw - he found himself at the forefront of the Polish avant-garde.

He also explored the folk music traditions in such works as Three Pieces in Old Style (1963) and Old Polish Music (1967-¬69).

His early pieces show a development from the folk-influenced worlds of Szymanowski and Bartok to more modernist techniques. The simple yet monumental style for which he came to be renowned became fully established in the 1970s, with such works as Symphony No. 2 ‘Copernican’ (1972), Symphony No. 3 (1976) and the Psalm setting Beatus vir (performed in Kraków to mark Pope John Paul II’s visit to Poland in 1979).

In the early 1980s, following the imposition of martial law in Poland, Górecki withdrew from public life and concentrated on choral settings, sacred music and chamber works.

International bestseller

In the 1990s, the recording of his Third Symphony, written twenty years earlier, achieved unprecedented international success, becoming the most popular recording of a work by a contemporary composer (thanks to a Nonesuch CD by the London Sinfonietta under David Zinman, with Dawn Upshaw as soloist).

Twenty five years ago, Gorecki’s music attracted new performers and audiences in the West. This led to the composition of three strong quartets, Already it is Dusk (1988), Quasi una fantasia (1991) and Songs are Sung (2005), all of them commissioned and premiered by the Kronos Quartet from San Francisco.

Górecki pursued a teaching career for many years, as a faculty member of the Music Academy in Katowice n 1968-1979, and its Rector in 1975-79. He received numerous honorary doctorates, including those from the Academy of Catholic Theology in Warsaw, Warsaw University, the Music Academy in Kraków, the Catholic University in Washington, the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Victoria University in Victoria, Canada, and the University of British Columbia in Montreal.

Henryk Mikołaj Górecki used to spend much time in his beloved Tatra foothills.

He is survived by his wife, Jadwiga, a pianist, and two children: the daughter Anna who has developed a successful career as a pianist and the son, Mikołaj, who is also a composer.


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This one is good:

[Bonobo]

Tributes to Gorecki from far and wide…
13.11.2010 14:31

As condololences pour in from far and wide folowing the death of Henryk Mikolaj Gorecki on Friday, the EU Commissioner for Education and Culture Andrulla Vassiliou is one of the many public figures who has paid tribute to the famous Polish composer.


“Poland lost one of its greatest sons, but his beautiful music will live on,” Vassiliou said in a press statement.

In his recollections of Gorecki, the composer’s contemporary, Krzysztof Penderecki told the daily Gazeta Wyborcza that “he remained faithful to himself until the very end. He was an independent mind, a man of moral integrity, someone who did not harbour hatred towards anybody.”

The prominent composer of the ‘middle generation’ Pawel Mykietyn said “I do not know what the essence is of music’s emotional impact, but if there are such notions as beauty and truth, they are no doubt in Gorecki’s compositions.”

The composer’s death is a front page story in the Polish weekend papers. Gazeta Wyborcza writes that even though his music is known to audiences all over the world, he said not long ago: “Before I die, I would like to learn what music is all about.”

Meanwhile, the music critic of the Rzeczpospolita daily writes that “Gorecki’s music has stood the test of time and will surely continue to be performed. It is incredibly modest, like Gorecki himself, and full of emotion at the same time.”

Henryk Mikolaj Gorecki would have turned 77 in three weeks’ time. The announcement of his death was made at 11.30 CET on Friday by Polish Radio 2, which interrupted its regular programming and continued with the Third Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, the work which made the composer famous around the world in the early 1990s.

Last month, Gorecki received the Order of the White Eagle, Poland’s highest state distinction. He is survived by his wife, Jadwiga, a pianist, and two children: a daughter Anna who has developed a successful career as a pianist and a son, Mikolaj, who is also a composer.

[pjotr]

I first heared Górecki's music in the holiday house of my parents in the Belgian Ardens mountains. A girlfriend (from Haarlem) of one of my girlfriends took Górecki's music to Belgium and we listened to it in silence in the typical rainy moist atmosphere of these mountains. It made a deep impression on me. The Third Symphony of Sorrowful Songs goes to deeper layers of grief, sorrow and pain, the song which shows the deep connection family members (the daugher and her mother), the Mourning (Żałoba) song.

I feel connected to Poland when I hear the song, and think about my grandmother in Mauthausen, my aunt in Auschwitz, the family members and acquaintances of my mothers family who died in Katyn. It is important to me that the song is in Polish!

The piece was the first piece of music played after the Holocaust in Auschwitz concentration camp.



Next to this Górecki was an important composer of modern classical music, also a-tonal and electronic, next to Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen.

[pjotr]