Not many recordings of contemporary symphonies sell a million copies but in the Nineties Dawn Upshaw's version of Henryk Górecki's Symphony of Sorrowful Songs passed that milestone. It's heard less often today; under Osmo Vänskä's steady guidance, the BBC Symphony Orchestra rediscovered its freshness.
The opening movement is astonishing. The simplest of musical ideas, at first barely audible, emerges from double basses and spreads glacially through the strings. Throughout, the music goes almost nowhere, yet there is a sense of travelling immense distances. Wisely, soprano Ruby Hughes resisted the temptation to over-emote, shaping Górecki’s doleful lines with radiant elegance. Even so, more weight and colour would have been welcome.
It made for a neat piece of programming symmetry that Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony ends where Górecki’s Third begins, with the low moan of double basses. The similarities end there. Vänskä’s reading of the Sixth gave a saucy lilt to the second movement dance and allowed the trumpets and trombones a certain bracing raucousness. Towards the end, it was, so to speak, a stroke of genius that the pivotal shudder of the gong emerged, as if disembodied, from somewhere high up in the hall’s darkest recesses.
Between the two symphonies, Jennifer Johnston gave a powerful reading of Vaughan Williams’s Four Last Songs. As the composer left them, they were for voice and piano. In a remarkable act of musical ventriloquism Anthony Payne had provided an orchestration (here a premiere) that simultaneously spoke with Vaughan Williams’s voice and Payne’s own.