Zofia Kilanowicz - G?recki: Symphony No. 3 ("Symphony of Sorrowful Songs"); Three Olden Style Pieces
|
List Price: Category: Music CD See more new music releases 
|
|---|
(Click here)
Buy this Music CD at online store in your country
Canadian Music Store
Canadian Music Store
Free Music Notes for G?recki: Symphony No. 3 ("Symphony of Sorrowful Songs"); Three Olden Style Pieces
Free Music Review: Beautiful music!
Hit: 5 Stars
"Symphony of Sorrowful Songs" is one of the most beautiful music pieces ever composed! If you can listen carefully, and let yourself be swept up by the piece, you will be very effected! While listening to the music, my heart started racing at one point, and I felt flushed from the reaction to the music! Beautiful!Free Music Review: Among the greatest Classical compositions
Hit: 5 Stars
It is rare when a composition has consistent appeal from beginning to end and one with such quality makes Gorecki's Symphony #3 a very rare find.
The beginning is unusually understated. For those with home theaters or a bass speaker, it will heighten the beauty of the string instruments. At a moderate volume, the introduction can vibrate the house. The first movement has a slow crescendo that cumulates to a very profound point. The second and third movements have such emotional beauty that I can justifiably claim that the vocal soloist is seraphic and sublime and it is as close to angelic singing that mortals can achieve. As one who does not care for opera, I want to stress that this music is not like opera in any way . For those who enjoy Beethoven's 9th, Ode to Joy, or In Trutina from Carmina Burana, this symphony can't disappoint.
Free Music Review: Dark poetry; tragic exuberance!
Hit: 5 Stars
Poland has been always a land of courageous and untamed spirit; stubborn to any single bit of domination. This territory has given sublime artists. Gorecki is one of the last exponents; even he was born just in the final of the WW2.
His famous Third Symphony is widely known all around the world and constituted definitively a mass phenomena, its consecration and full acceptation. Gorecki employed an admirable sense of the musical texture inviting us to imagine an enormous birch's forest with astonishing austerity of means economy in what orchestration concerns. This music suggests me the kaleidoscopic awakening of slept centuries under the history 's carpet. Ancestral sorrows, delirious visions with that contemplative gaze in the mirror 's memory. In this Christmas, it is a magnificent chance to listen it once more.
This is possibly the most idiomatic version recorded until this date. Wit made no concessions of any kind. The reading is marvelous and heartfelt; emotion and epic have been magnificently blended and besides, supported by an inspired ensemble. Zofia Kilanowicz is simply bewitching as Soprano. The Second Movement is perfect.
Go for this spelling recording.
Free Music Review: Sorrow wrapped in radiance
Hit: 5 Stars
I can't waste time comparing versions, as I have only heard the other bargain version with the same soprano, which lacks the lusciousness of this CD in my humble opinion. I see no reason to look beyond this version anyway, which is a sublime offering from artists clearly steeped in the emotional heartland it surveys.
Others have said it all, this is music (and indeed a performance) that elicits tears on almost every listen. To a Buddhist as myself, who can see unresolved suffering and sorrow even on the faces of those encountering temporal happiness, this music is a vivid portrayal through sound of our human birthright of disquiet and dissatisfaction, which can be transformed only through connection with our divine nature. Compassion, which can only be generated through our encounters with suffering - how can we hope to wish others to be free of it if we have never met it face-to-face? - radiates from this CD from opening note to close.
The review below that gave this album 5 stars, but only because of the performance, rather than the music itself, is one of the most pathetic offerings I have seen among Amazon reviews. How can any performance be divorced from the piece itself? To compare this glorious piece of music with a relaxation tape merely highlights the ignorance of the reviewer. Did you actually LISTEN to this album? I doubt it!
THERE ARE FEW 'CLASSICAL' OFFERINGS THAT OFFER THE EMOTIONAL RANGE OF THIS CD. IT STANDS AS A LANDMARK OF BOTH 20TH CENTURY COMPOSITION AND PERFORMANCE - A MUST BUY!
Free Music Review: When sorrow becomes exquisite beauty...
Hit: 5 Stars
I own several other recordings of the haunting "Symphony of Sorrowful Songs", a masterpiece which doesn't need the explanatory "modern" in front of it. G?recki's works have aroused intense criticism from some music critics who feel that modern music must eschew lyricism, cease to be enslaved to the major/minor tonality of the "past", and tread bravely into the waters of atonality, arhythmicality, and a-beauty.
But music is primarily audio rather than intellectual. It is there to be listened to, which means that AT LEAST one of the criteria for music ought to be how it sounds. It's all very well creating an incredibly clever tone row and patting oneself on the back for writing a concerto for a gravedigger's spade, an electric blender and a toilet being flushed, but who is going to listen to such a work, over and over? A hundred years from now, it will probably be rightly regarded as a curiosity rather than anything else.
G?recki has composed some works which are so extraordinary that the listener is spellbound, mesmerised by the almost elegaic quality of it. Is it non-intellectual? By no means! It is a strange point of view which considers intellectual quality to be discerned only as the inverse of listenability.
There are, of course, several recordings of this remarkable work currently available. All of them are good. But this one... well, it's beyond good, because the singer, soprano Zofia Kilanowicz, is so immersed in the words, and immerses the listener so completely into the words, that the heartbreak becomes our own. We feel as never before the terrible pity of it - Mary in front of the cross; the words of the young girl written on the wall; the woman looking for the body of her son fallen in battle. It is no shame to weep in listening to this recording, because the sorrow transcends the personal, although it never becomes LESS than personal. But it reaches out to touch the core of human understanding. This is a lament for all loss, all death, all grief, all injustice. It is simply... heartbreaking... and very, very beautiful.
That a listener is able to come away with a sense of hope as well as intense grief is due to the music, which shimmers and shines in the dark places of the heart.
Other versions of this work, while lovely, do not have the same plangent quality as this. I was surprised that I did not feel more intensely when listening to the Susan Gritton recording of this, as I consider her a superb singer with a wonderfully expressive quality, but strangely she did not quite achieve the colour of tears that the work requires. The Yvonne Kenny recording is lovely, but it's more about sound than meaning. I can feel Yvonne Kenny being careful about making the right sounds - I DON'T feel her twisting my heart with the meaning. The Dawn Upshaw recording is lovely but bland in comparison, as well.
In every respect - the incredibly cheap price, the exquisite orchestral playing, the wonderful singing - this is the version to have.