Henryk Górecki: Symphony No. 3
by David Zinman / London Sinfonietta / Dawn Upshaw

I guess this could be what a part of me looks like on the inside. Some kind of beauty and the desire directed towards some kind of higher purpose. It could be no other way. It's like a memory that overwhelms me and I realize something I haven't thought or felt in a long time, or more like a place of home on the inside, a place I visited all the time at some, probably young age. Without it, I would feel at least half. I think it holds very many, and often contradictory emotions, not all of them pleasant, hence it's so very personal. When it happens with litterature or the other arts it's often more indirect, or intellectual, or includes some sort of surprise when thinking, and then emotions. Music is like a smell. A highway to the inner parts of the brain.

Marcel Proust in 1919 puts it on music, in Swann’s Way:

"...when for the first time he had heard the sonata played. He knew that his memory of the piano falsified still further the perspective in which he saw the music, that the field open to the musician is not a miserable stave of seven notes, but an immeasurable keyboard (still, almost all of it, unknown), on which, here and there only, separated by the gross darkness of its unexplored tracts, some few among the millions of keys, keys of tenderness, of passion, of courage, of serenity, which compose it, each one differing from all the rest as one universe differs from another, have been discovered by certain great artists who do us the service, when they awaken in us the emotion corresponding to the theme which they have found, of shewing us what richness, what variety lies hidden, unknown to us, in that great black impenetrable night, discouraging exploration, of our soul, which we have been content to regard as valueless and waste and void. Vinteuil had been one of those musicians. In his little phrase, albeit it presented to the mind’s eye a clouded surface, there was contained, one felt, a matter so consistent, so explicit, to which the phrase gave so new, so original a force, that those who had once heard it preserved the memory of it in the treasure-chamber of their minds.

Swann would repair to it as to a conception of love and happiness, of which at once he knew as well in what respects it was peculiar as he would know of the Princesse de Clèves, or of René, should either of those titles occur to him. Even when he was not thinking of the little phrase, it existed, latent, in his mind, in the same way as certain other conceptions without material equivalent, such as our notions of light, of sound, of perspective, of bodily desire, the rich possessions wherewith our inner temple is diversified and adorned. Perhaps we shall lose them, perhaps they will be obliterated, if we return to nothing in the dust. But so long as we are alive, we can no more bring ourselves to a state in which we shall not have known them than we can with
regard to any material object, than we can, for example, doubt the luminosity of a lamp that has just been lighted, in view of the changed aspect of everything in the room, from which has vanished even the memory of the darkness."

From Fischman 04/11/2017 19:14 | #189099

Haunting. Compelling. Gorgeous. Sad. A rare accomplishment of minimalism with deep emotion.

A dynamic interpretation of an amazing composition.

I just want to say that the third part of this, Cantabile semplice, is one of the best pieces of music that I have heard.