Friday 28 April 2023

Henryk Górecki's Symphony of Sorrowful Songs at ENO in an astonishing visual treat from Isabella Bywater

Górecki:Symphony of Sorrowful Songs - Nicole Chevalier - English National Opera (Photo: Clive Barda)
Górecki:Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, third movement - Nicole Chevalier - English National Opera (Photo: Clive Barda)

Henryk Górecki: Symphony of Sorrowful Songs; Nicole Chevalier, director: Isabella Bywater, conductor: Lidiya Yankovskaya; English National Opera at the London Coliseum

Górecki's moving symphony given a treatment that is less a dramatisation and more a poetic visual meditation on the music

For its last new main stage event of the season, English National Opera (ENO) made the intriguing choice to present a staging of Henryk Górecki's Symphony No. 3 'Symphony of Sorrowful Songs'. Symphony of Sorrowful Songs opened at the London Coliseum on 27 April 2023 in a production directed and designed by Isabella Bywater. Lidiya Yankovskaya conducted the orchestra of English National Opera with soprano Nicole Chevalier who was joined on stage by six actors - Christian Flynn, Alessandro Gruttadauria, Malik Ibheis, Owen McHugh, Ryan Munroe, Ben Owara. 

Video design was by Roberto Vitalini, lighting by Jon Driscoll with Dan O'Neil as movement director. The work was sung in the original Polish. The staging was ENO's first adhering to the Theatre Green Book, with costumes sourced from charity shops.

Górecki:Symphony of Sorrowful Songs - Nicole Chevalier - English National Opera (Photo: Clive Barda)
Górecki:Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, first movement - Nicole Chevalier - English National Opera (Photo: Clive Barda)

It wasn't an opera as such, but a music theatre piece that verged on being an installation, but Bywater and Vitalini came up with some astonishing images to accompany the music.

Górecki's symphony premiered in 1976. It came at a time when the composer was moving away from his earlier style of complex modernism and the new symphony did not go down particularly well. It is perhaps significant that though Górecki was working alone in Poland, other composers were turning away from modernism at the time, such as Arvo Part in Estonia and Steve Reich in the USA. Górecki's later style would be associated with minimalism; the symphony is not strictly a minimalist work, but its repetitive techniques are associated with it. There is also an element of romanticism in the work's sheer beauty.

Its prominence came in the 1990s when Dawn Upshaw recorded it with the London Sinfonietta. This recording, of the last movement in particular, moved the symphony to a new place in audience understanding. The sheer mesmerising beauty of the performance created and abstract feeling which moved away from the meaning of the words that Górecki set.

Górecki:Symphony of Sorrowful Songs - Nicole Chevalier - English National Opera (Photo: Clive Barda)
Górecki:Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, second movement - Nicole Chevalier - English National Opera (Photo: Clive Barda)

The three texts are rather intense. The first is a 15th-century Polish lament of Mary, mother of Jesus; the second, a message written on the wall of a Gestapo cell during World War II; and the third, a Silesian folk song of a mother searching for her son killed by the Germans in the Silesian uprisings. Bywater's production took each movement separately, creating a distinct mood. 

In the first, a mother grieved for her adult son. Whilst the imagery was abstract and remarkably startling with Chevalier being flown into the air, the presence of a male body laid out like images of Christ in the tomb certainly kept the link with the Virgin. For the second, a woman was grieving for her own impending death, whilst for the final, and longest, movement, a woman is searching for her son's body, lost in a civil war. She does not find him, but at the end we returned to religious imagery when Chevalier was given wings and was flown up, to hover over her own image.

Chevalier's performance was more intense and more dramatic than the familiar performance from the recording. But the decision to perform it in the original Polish was, I think, a mistake. This meant that there was a layer between Chevalier and the audience, and the vocal line remained, to a certain extent, abstract.

Górecki:Symphony of Sorrowful Songs - Nicole Chevalier - English National Opera (Photo: Clive Barda)
Górecki:Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, third movement - Nicole Chevalier - English National Opera (Photo: Clive Barda)

The set was relatively simple, just two curtains through which people could move and onto which Vitalini's videos were projected. It was the videos that created a series of striking transformations to the visual environment. It certainly wasn't static, Bywater and O'Neil used the full extent of the stage for movement, as well as the occasions when Chevalier moved above the stage, adding a greater element of three-dimensionality to the production.

Lidiya Yankovskaya and the orchestra brought beauty and rich expressivity to the orchestral score. The orchestra is important here, this is a symphony not a song cycle, and I thought it a shame that the players were still hidden in the pit. Though it would have radically changed the production, having the orchestra on the stage would have been a visual representation of this.

There were questions. Why was an American soprano singing in Polish at English National Opera? If Polish was to be used, why not a Polish soprano so that the words had more currency. The project felt almost as if it was not completely realised. Why not use dancers and a choreographer to fully realise the movement aspects? The evening was rather short, just 60 minutes, would it not have been better to have had an accompanying work? Whilst watching Symphony of Sorrowful Songs I began to wonder what a visual treatment of Britten's Sinfonia da Requiem might be like.

Górecki:Symphony of Sorrowful Songs - Nicole Chevalier - English National Opera (Photo: Clive Barda)
Górecki:Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, first movement - Nicole Chevalier - English National Opera (Photo: Clive Barda)

Bywater's production gave us some astonishing imagery. It wasn't a dramatisation so much as a poetic visual meditation on the music.








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