Portishead singer Beth Gibbons’ concert with the Polish National Radio Symphony — a performance of Henryk Górecki’s Symphony No. 3 — will be the focus of a live album due out in March.
Domino will release both an audio and video recording of Henryk Górecki: Symphony No. 3 (Symphony of Sorrowful Songs), which features Gibbons’ November 29th, 2014 performance with the orchestra conducted by Krzysztof Penderecki, Poland’s greatest living composer.
“Following an invitation to collaborate at the concert, Beth Gibbons undertook an intense preparation process, including tackling the challenge of learning the Polish original text (and the emotional weight it carries) without speaking the mother language,” Domino said of the performance.
“The other challenge was the music itself. Beth’s voice is, in classical terms, a contralto; Górecki wrote for a soprano, one register higher. While she had ventured into the soprano range before, she hadn’t spent a sustained stretch of time there in performance; she sought the help of both English and Polish vocal coaches. Typical to Beth, the challenge was met and exceeded.”
The 1992 album release was something of an outlier at the time since the recording climbed to Number Six on the mainstream U.K. album charts and to date it has sold over a million copies. Henryk Górecki: Symphony No. 3 (Symphony of Sorrowful Songs) arrives March 29th in a variety of formats, included a deluxe edition of the LP that come paired with both limited edition photo print signed by Gibbons and a DVD of the performance. The live LP, Gibbons’ first release of any kind since Portishead’s 2008 LP Third, is available to preorder now.
Henryk Górecki: Symphony No. 3 (Symphony of Sorrowful Songs) Track List
I. Lento — Sostenuto tranquillo ma cantabile
II. Lento e largo — Tranquillissimo
III. Lento — Cantabile-semplice