Henryk Górecki

Henryk Mikołaj Górecki (1933–2010) was a Polish composer whose Symphony No. 3 (Symphony of Sorrowful Songs) became one of the most unexpected bestsellers in the history of classical recording, selling more than a million copies after a recording by soprano Dawn Upshaw with the London Sinfonietta under David Zinman was broadcast on BBC Radio 3 in 1992. Born in Czernica, Silesia, he studied at the State Higher School of Music in Katowice, where he later became rector.

Górecki's early work was marked by avant-garde experimentation; his Second Symphony (1972) and First String Quartet show the influence of Penderecki and the Polish school. But from the mid-1970s he moved towards a personal style of intense simplicity — repetitive, slow-moving, harmonically pure — which he called 'sacred minimalism' or 'slow music'. The Third Symphony (1976), for soprano and orchestra in three slow movements, sets Polish texts connected to sorrow, loss and motherhood: a lament for the dead, an inscription from the wall of a Gestapo cell written by an eighteen-year-old girl, and a folk song of a mother searching for her son killed in war.

Crystal Pite used the symphony for Flight Pattern (2017), a Royal Ballet commission responding to the global refugee crisis. The work's combination of overwhelming communal grief and individual tenderness made it ideally suited to Pite's choreographic vision.