Paraorchestra, Charles Hazlewood

Paraorchestra
Charles Hazlewood conductor
Victoria Oruwari soprano

Schubert/Mahler String Quartet No. 14, Death and the Maiden
Górecki Symphony of Sorrowful Songs

Cathartic and hauntingly beautiful, Henryk Górecki’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs is an astonishing meditation on loss and transcendence.

Performed by Paraorchestra’s pioneering ensemble of disabled and non-disabled musicians with acclaimed soprano Victoria Oruwari, Charles Hazlewood conducts this harmonic ‘spiritual minimalist’ composition.

Each of the three movements of Symphony of Sorrowful Songs features a Polish lament, taking audiences on an uplifting journey through grief and solace.

Górecki’s masterpiece is preceded by a performance of Schubert's Death and the Maiden: a melancholic, iridescent, and urgent piece realised for a full string orchestra by Mahler.

Did you know?

Schubert’s 14th String Quartet takes its title from an earlier song, Death and the Maiden, in which a girl struggles against the terror of impending death.

Górecki’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs was composed in 1976. The first recording sold more than one million copies. He said of it: ‘Perhaps people find something they need in this piece of music, something they were missing. Something, somewhere had been lost to them. I feel that I instinctively knew what they needed.’

Three songs are featured: the Virgin Mary addressing her son, Jesus, on the cross; an 18-year-old daughter’s scratched graffito on a Nazi prison wall imploring ‘Mother don’t cry’; and a Mother’s lament for her son killed while protesting for Polish independence. 

Listen out for…

Mahler’s addition of double basses in his arrangement of Schubert that add especial weight and gravitas to the five variations of original’s melody in the second movement.

The poignant treatment of the young girl’s prison prayer in Górecki’s second movement, laced with a chant from a Polish setting of the ‘Ave Maria’.

Górecki’s evocative use of drones – a single, low-pitched note – and of canons, where the same melody is repeated at different intervals to create a sense of harmony.

Presented by NCH