Gorecki, Henryk - Lerchenmusik (Chamber Music)

"Henryk Gorecki (b. 1933) has become one of the most significant exponents of what is often called 'the new simplicity'. If the challenge to 'complex' composers (Carter, Ferneyhough) is to achieve clarity of thought and purposefulness of argument, that to 'simple' composers is to avoid mirroring the priorities of mere commercialism—bypassing the mind in order to manipulate emotions the more effectively.

Gorecki meets this challenge through the psychological complexity of his musical expression. His forms may be simple—cumulative repetitions, strong contrasts. But the materials resonate with personal associations—Polish folk-music, religious chant, the heritage of European art music—whose function may be richly ambiguous. In the last movement of Lerchenmusik, for example, you need not recognize the opening of Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto to appreciate that Gorecki is creating an atmosphere finely poised between tragedy and serenity. But if you do recognize the allusion, you may be puzzled as to what, if anything, it means—for Gorecki, and for you, the listener.

Lerchenmusik, completed in 1986, is the longest of the two compositions on this superlatively well performed and recorded disc. (Its title reflects its commissioning by the Lerche family of Lerchenborg Castle, Denmark, rather than any immediate associations with the German word for 'lark'.) The music proves that Gorecki is not a wholly anti-developmental composer, and his use of the elements of traditional tonality is too highly-charged to be dismissed as self-indulgent nostalgia. Yet for all the passion and directness of his appeal to feeling, I remain uneasy about what his music—the string quartet no less than Lerchenmusik—resists and rejects. The whole point of contemporary pluralism is that composers like Gorecki and Part can flourish alongside the Carters and the Ferneyhoughs, and it is listeners who can admire both types of music equally who will feel most at home in this modern world. Yet even if, like me, you have doubts about present-day 'simplicity', this record makes for absorbing listening."
(Gramophoen Sept 1991)