Disc Details

Contents

Work Title	Composer
Symphony No. 3 'Symphony Of Sorrowful Songs', op.36	Henryk Mikolaj Górecki	Listen

Reviews

• This is a performance of the Symphony that offers something new. Ingrid Perruche’s glorious soprano is wonderfully coloured, its timbral possibilities (including the application of vibrato) wholly within her control. Opulent and perfectly true, the voice also has a lovely ‘open’ quality. She brings warmth and tenderness, and in the outer movements an impression of untapped reserves of power that could be called upon if necessary. There’s something distinctly reassuring, even maternal (given the context), about this: these are the songs of mothers, after all. By contrast, in the second movement, in which the text comes from the wall of a Gestapo prison cell where it was inscribed by an 18-year old girl, the vocal line is projected with disarming purity and innocence.
  
  The Sinfonia Varsovia plays admirably under Alain Altinoglu, bringing to the Symphony an urgent, keenly expressive lyrical intimacy, and revealing the work’s changing textures with exquisite sensitivity. These and other matters of articulation have, in this performance, been attended to with supreme care; the results are truly moving. What’s more, the sound qualities of the recording are wonderfully clear, luminous and immediate. In short: an outstanding disc.
  Christopher Ballantine, International Record Review, 01 July 2006