Henryk Górecki

condition (records/cover): NM / EX

Most people who know Henryk Górecki know the later one: the Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, the million-copy record, the unexpected crossover. This LP preserves the other one - the Górecki who stood at the centre of the Polish avant-garde in the late 1950s and early 1960s, a composer for whom dissonance and structural violence were both artistic and political necessities.

Four works, four phases of an astonishing decade. Epitafium (1958) - his debut at the Warsaw Autumn Festival, setting a sardonic last poem by Julian Tuwim in spare serial language - marked his arrival. Scontri (1960) for large orchestra caused a sensation at the following Autumn: its title means "collisions," and the music delivers on that, dense vertical and horizontal clashes organized with geometric precision. One critic at the time placed him alongside Penderecki as the leading voice of the Polish modernist school. Genesis II: Canti Strumentali (1962), for fifteen players, belongs to what scholars call his "geometrical period" - compositions derived from axes, symmetry, and dimensional patterns rather than conventional musical logic. And Refrain (1965) marks the first fracture: an orchestral work of such extreme slowness and stripped harmonic content that one observer wrote of it as a composer saying to the European avant-garde, plainly and without apology, that he was his own man. The retreat from complexity had begun. What followed was the Symphony No. 3. But here, in these four works, is where the rupture lives. Original Philips pressing.