Journal Sunday, February 12, 2012

Henryk Górecki, Arvo Pärt to Be Featured Composers on BBC Four's "Sacred Music"

Composers Henryk Górecki and Arvo Pärt will be featured in the latest episode of Sacred Music, the BBC Four program, now in its second season, hosted by actor Simon Russell, that explores the flowering of Western sacred music. Previous composers examined this season include Brahms, Bruckner, Fauré, and Poulenc. The episode premieres on BBC Four this Friday, March 26, at 7:30 PM GMT, with encore presentations scheduled for March 27 and April 1. For more information on Sacred Music, visit bbc.co.uk, where viewers in the UK will also be able to watch the show online.

The 1991 Nonesuch recording of Górecki's Third Symphony, "Symphony of Sorrowful Songs," featuring Dawn Upshaw performing with the London Sinfonietta and conductor David Zinman, would go on to sell more than a million copies, landing at an unprecedented No. 6 spot on the British pop charts, and become the highest-selling album by a contemporary composer. "Perhaps people find something they need in this piece of music," the composer has said. "Somehow I hit the right note, something they were missing." The Sinfonietta later recorded a 1995 album of Górecki's music, featuring his Kleines Requiem für eine Polka.

Each of Górecki's three string quartets was written for Kronos Quartet, which has recorded them all for Nonesuch. Most recent was String Quartet No. 3, "... songs are sung," released in 2007, preceded by a single disc in 1993 with String Quartets No. 1 & 2, a collection Time called "sanguine in its magisterial technique and confident in its calm, unmannered directness of expression."

Also in the Nonesuch Górecki catalog is a 1994 recording of his piece Miserere, composed during a period of Polish national upheaval in 1981.

Kronos has recorded the work of Arvo Pärt for Nonesuch as well, for their albums Winter Was Hard (1988) and Early Music (1997), as have Gidon Kremer and the Kremerata Baltica, for their 2000 Nonesuch release, Silencio.

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