Excellent, poignant recording
I absolutely love this piece, and this (the original) is an excellent recording of it. Upshaw expresses the feeling of the music so wonderfully. I first heard this in concert with the Brooklyn Philharmonic, and they had a video of the view from a helicopter or airplane flying along a beach. This music expresses the same peace and beauty and poignancy (for me at least) of dawn at the beach.

A Short Review since the others say about all!
Listening to the incredible 1st Movement,which begins in virtual silence, and slowly builds to an incredible crescendo of strings, then the solo vocal, and then the apocalyptic strings right after the vocal is almost beyond belief. Driving alone at night,full of stars, and listening to this almost may make one feel at one with the heavens. Amazing! PS There are many similarities to the later composed theme to the movie "Fearless"; Barber's "Adagio for Strings"; and many others, though this may be in a class by itself!

Gorecki: Symphony 3
I cannot express how moving I find this work to be. The continuous "drone" of this symphony and the 3 note motif rings so true to express so much about our modern lives and our most personal thoughts. I do truly find it a "sorrowful song" as the vocal, coupled with the long legato notes of the double basses, challenges each step as this symphony moves forward. There is a daunting quality of hope as the reoccurring motif rings out to call for a new tomorrow. This symphony is a joy to listen to and I do listen often, in my car, at home and at work - for some strange reason it calls my name, over and over. I will seek out all of Gorecki work.

This image comes to mind as I listen to this symphony;
a homeless man stands in front of a "TV Center" (vendor of TVs) watching "the good life" on a color TV though the window, as he stands in the cold snowy night, illuminated by the color TV, in his black and white world.

ashes, sorrow, music
It is a commonplace that the exilic prophets who moved captive Judah to imagine a future beyond the certain full stop that was exile in Babylonia saved the life and future of a nation. In the mix, they produced some of humankind's most stirring poetry.

Redemptive art does not justify tragedy and does not ameliorate its dark realia. Yet it is a measure of the created world and of the human spirit that unspeakable pain somehow creates some of history's finest words and most gripping sounds.

Enter the twentieth-century Polish composers Henryk Gorecki and his Symphony No. 3 ('Sorrowful Songs'), performed here in a stunning 1991 recording by the London Sinfonietta under the direction of David Zinman.

A widely-circulated encyclopedia of music mentions this works as 'of singular importance to the unfolding apostmodernist aesthetic in Europe and then concludes with this shocking but indisputable verdict: '... some find it deeply inspiring, others find it unbearably tedious and predictable.'

Indeed. Art out of the ashes almost inevitably elicits this dualism of response.

This reviewer finds Gorecki's most-listened-to work a masterpiece of understated, richly harmonious, soul-leveraging passion. Dawn Upshaw is magnificent in her interpretation of the work's few, dense, pleading words.

An amateur lover of classical music, I have stumbled upon Gorecki only lately. Quickly the composer has moved to the top rank of musical creators whose product I find most capable of emotional deconstruction and at the same time generative of deep satisfaction and fresh resolve. Art does not exist for such an outcome, yet it is only the best art that produces it as a byproduct of its apprehension of beautiful things.

The landscape of Poland is no less littered with bone and ash for the existence of this symphony. Art does not ameliorate evil. Yet, it is the nature of a world in which redemption is a never-impossible and recurring surprise, that ash and bone occasionally become the soil in which something as beautiful as Gorecki's Symphony No. 3 is born.

Evil, the exilic prophets plead with us still to understand, is penultimate.

Sorrowful Songs
This Symphony is an absolute masterpiece. The composition, orchestration and performance are brilliant. Dawn Upshaw has the voice to carry this deep and moving lament.