Top of The Pops: A Symphony?

By Michael Walsh

IT IS THE UNLIKELIEST OF SYMPHONIC success stories. The composer: a little- known Polish avant-gardist named Henryk Gorecki. The music: his Symphony No. 3, subtitled Symphony of Sorrowful Songs -- a transcendental meditation on mortality and redemption for orchestra and soprano. In three slow, slow, very slow movements lasting nearly an hour, it speaks of bleak despair yet sings of sublime hope. Against all odds, this deeply felt, quasi-liturgical piece -- composed 17 years ago but newly recorded -- is captivating a huge public on both sides of the Atlantic, far bigger than most serious compositions ever reach. It is at the top of the classical charts in the U.S. and Britain and, amazingly, has risen as high as No. 6 on the British pop charts as well. "I can't believe the fuss is actually about me," says its astonished creator.

Why has the symphony struck such a resonant chord? The texts, which include a 15th century monastic lament, a mournful folk song about the death of a child and, most movingly, a brief prayer to the Virgin inscribed on the wall of a Gestapo prison by an 18-year-old Polish girl, evoke a sunless world of pain and suffering. The ineffable music, which unfolds seamlessly from small, minimalist melodic motifs, evolves into a soaring Brucknerian cathedral. Hardly the stuff of which gold records are made.

"Nobody can answer the questions 'Why now? Why this piece?' " says Gorecki (pronounced Goor-et-ski), 59, outside his apartment in Katowice, a grimy industrial city 185 miles southwest of Warsaw, where he lives with his wife Jadwiga and their two grown children. "Perhaps people, especially young people, find something they need in this piece of music, something they are seeking."

Seek and ye shall find: since its release last April, more than 200,000 copies of the Nonesuch CD, featuring soprano Dawn Upshaw and the London Sinfonietta conducted by David Zinman, have been sold worldwide, 140,000 of them in Britain. An average classical album usually sells around 15,000 copies; the Gorecki recently sold 14,000 in a single day in Britain.

The recording is the brainchild of Elektra Nonesuch senior vice president Robert Hurwitz, 43. Hurwitz first heard the symphony nearly a decade ago in one of the three previously recorded versions, but upon encountering it again at a London Sinfonietta program in 1989, he determined to record it with Upshaw and Zinman. Gorecki was present for the sessions in London in May 1991. "There is a brutal truth and honesty to this performance," says Hurwitz, "because the performers surrendered themselves to the music."

Like the Pachelbel Canon, Ravel's Bolero or even Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells, Gorecki's Third relies on hypnotic repetition to induce a state of New Age-like ecstasy in its listeners. When the recording was played on public radio station KCRW in Santa Monica, California, enchanted motorists pulled off the freeways to phone in and find out what it was. In Britain the album has benefited from a canny, pop-oriented marketing strategy whose centerpiece is extensive airplay on the country's new classical radio station, Classic FM, a trendy alternative to the BBC's more staid Radio 3. Says Bill Holland, general manager of the British distributor, Warner Classics (UK): "We felt that once people heard it -- the right bit of it -- they would love and remember it." The symphony is now scheduled for concert performances in the Netherlands, Britain and the U.S., and -- shades of MTV! -- director Peter Sellars is working on a video.

Nothing in Gorecki's arduous life and career has prepared him for such renown. His mother died when he was two; World War II began when he was five, and with it came the brutal Nazi occupation and the murder of several members of his family in the nearby Auschwitz concentration camp. Then came communism, which frowned on some of Gorecki's early compositions and on the frank display of his Roman Catholic faith. When Gorecki wrote and conducted his choral work Beatus Vir in honor of the visit of Pope John Paul II in 1979, he was forced to resign as rector of the Katowice conservatory.

Gorecki's music was not always so accessible. In the '60s he was a fire- breathing radical who startled audiences with explosive sonorities. Gradually a mystical element crept into his work, though lately he has been veering back to the harsher sounds of his youth. He works diligently, often rising with the sun and composing around the clock. His main relaxation is at the piano, playing music of, among others, Mozart, Chopin and Brahms. Next January the reluctant celebrity will travel to New York City for the premiere of his Third String Quartet by the Kronos Quartet, which commissioned it. Meanwhile he has so many other scores in progress that he says he has enough work to last him 500 years.

"It is unbelievably hard work, writing music," says Gorecki, "but slowly, slowly it comes." And when it comes like the Symphony No. 3, it is well worth the wait.

With reporting by Angela Leuker/Katowice and Daniel S. Levy/New York