Word: gorecki
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Sollscher advertises itself as "Italian Music for Violin & Guitar-Perfect Company for Relaxing at Home." Recently breaking Billboard's classical top 20 as well as Tower's classical top 10, this recording's success continues a trend in popular classical music which arguably started with the fuss over Henryk Gorecki's third symphony, and includes the more recent "international phenomenon" of Chant...
Bach Society Orchestra. The orchestra will perform its first concert featuring Schubert's Symphony No. 8 in B minor, "Unfinished," Gorecki's Three Pieces in Olden Style and Saint-Saens' Symphony No. 2 in a minor, Op. 59. Paine Hall, 8 p.m. $5 for students. Tickets are available at the Holyoke Center Ticket Office and at the door...
...what of Gorecki's other music? Is he just a one-tune wonder, or does he have more songs to sing? Two new CDs provide the answer. Koch Schwann has issued Symphony No. 1, "1959"; Choros I, a major work for string orchestra from 1964; and the brief Three Pieces in the Old Style (1963) for strings. From Elektra Nonesuch come two recent string quartets, Already It Is Dusk (No. 1) and Quasi una Fantasia (No. 2). The result is a fuller, rounder picture of an uncompromising modernist who just may be the Bruckner...
...Gorecki's compositional language has changed over the years; it is a long way from the atonal pointillism of the Symphony No. 1 and the relentless brutality of the Choros I to the contemplative beauties of the Quasi una Fantasia quartet of 1991. The symphony, so typically "modern" in its harsh sonorities and deliberate absence of melodic appeal, is not much different from what Boulez and others in Western Europe were doing at about the same time; the Choros, meanwhile, is clearly influenced by Gorecki's countryman Krzysztof Penderecki, notably by the Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima...
...despite the superficial differences in idiom among his works, what remains constant is Gorecki's unshakable faith. Like Bruckner's soaring Gothic symphonies, Gorecki's music is secure -- staunch in its Catholicism, sanguine in its magisterial technique and confident in its calm, unmannered directness of expression...