Chill Out ? I Don't Think So

Symphony No 3 ( Symphony of Sorrowful Songs ) by Gorecki seems to have got the undeserved reputation of being some kind of superior chill out music, thanks to its' popularity on Classic FM and a certain similarity to Barber's Adagio for Strings which has suffered from the same slur. I hardly think the subject matter of the texts set is at all escapist, although of course the idle listener can easliy ignore the content since it is sung in Polish. There is a 15th century Polish lamentation portraying the Virgin Mary grieving over the fallen Christ, a prayer to mary scrawled by a teenage girl on the walls of a Gestapo prison in the Polish town of Zakopane and a Polish folk song where a mother mourns her son killed in some far off war. All three movements are slow but with subtle shadings and variations. There is a certain hypnotic quality ( hence the chill out thing )and a sparseness similar to Arvo Part. The work is scored almost exclusively for strings and the performers here are the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra of Katowice conducted by Antoni Wit with the soprano soloist Zofia Kilanowicz. Also on the disk are Three Olden Style Pieces, further short instrumental sketches for strings that augment the mood of the symphony.