The Symphony of Sorrowful Songs

A landmark and multi-award winning film by Tony Palmer celebrating the Polish composer Gorecki. Palmer's film 'The Symphony of Sorrowful Songs' with soprano Dawn Upshaw and the London Sinfonietta conducted by David Zinman, captured imaginations with its overwhelming power and harrowingly simple lyrics. The Symphony actually dates from 1976 when Górecki was (as he tells us in the film) a 'non-person' in the political sense, when his music was banned in his native Katowice in Poland. Melvyn Bragg showed the film on The South Bank Show, and even managed to persuade the hierarchy of ITV that it would be an abomination to disrupt the film with any commercial breaks. The 53 minute film was shown uninterrupted, an acceptance perhaps of the urgency of its content. "I wanted to express a great sorrow", Górecki says. "The war...the rotten times under Communism...our life today...the starving. What madness! This sorrow, it burns inside me. I cannot shake it off".

Track
0 trackers | Status: Ended | Airs on ITV |