As a composer and musician well acquainted with the work of Henryk Górecki, familiar enough perhaps to allow the free convention of using only his last name, it gives me great sense of pleasure to impart my thoughts on the most popular of his large scale works.

But before I continue, I will amorously confess now that this particular recording has always disappointed me copiously after I became besotted with another recording by Zofia Kilanowicz and the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra.
Despite its 'budget' quality (replete with a highly audible background hubbub of coughs and creaking stools), there is for me rarely a promising counterpart for the radiance of Kilanowicz's devastatingly authentic voice. Kilanowicz bows with a beauteous humility, tears out her truly despairing heart and exhales every movement with an effortless strength as if it were her very own dying breath. Upshaw's effort is evidently different. Lighter perhaps, or more technically precise even, but largely it still retains a disappointing weakness.
Generally, Her intonation and pronunciation is too crystalline and calculated for what should be, in my eyes, a naturally irrepressible emotional inundation. To understand what is really crucial for the soloist, one only has to consider the blood in which all of the text is symbolized. Similarly one must regard the undulating strings which haul and sigh like some vast ocean of tears at the command of a mothers sorrow, her voice, soaring and echoing in an inconsolable, universal mourning.
Alas, the London Sinfonietta do a predictably good job but still I fail not to wince as upon the most integral climaxes of each movement, Upshaw cruelly bends her notes with an over-controlled operatic wistfulness inappropriate for both the context and a piece highlighting the Post-war modernist era.

But enough! In order to make some valuable imprint upon this page I do not wish to make mere comparisons in sound quality or to disgrace Upshaw's otherwise crystalline demeanour.

It is the sublime perpetuity of this divine composition that entices and ensnares the listener into vast drifts of nostalgic sorrow....

Imagine if you will a blithe child playing alone in the subtle serenity of a Polish Winter. As he rolls a ball of glittering ice between his tiny mittens and goes to throw he is, all of a sudden, startled by an effervescent bloodstain in the snow beneath his feet.

This omnipresent statement by Górecki on behalf of the victims of the Holocaust and indeed the anguish of the Mother of Christ is somewhat unmatched by anything else (bar his Miserere for scalic purposes) of the composer's work and clearly stands as an island, or rather a plateau at which no note, no mark in the near perfect score is conducive to opposition.

Despite Part's most recent work 'Orient and Occident' or indeed his 'LamenTate' scored for Anish Kapoor's remarkable sculpture at the Tate Modern, Miserere still exists as a celestial and cavernous masterpiece, overshadowing or rather still evidently commanding his present work.
Scored for an extraneous cacophony of the finest soloists (the favourites from the Hilliard Ensemble), chorus and orchestra, the dimension of sound created within the stases of extreme texture-both restrained and humble against the declarative and mighty his effect is extraordinarily overwhelming on both scales.
One is made ultimately aware of a direct embodiment of the composer's ineffable intent. And so with a conscious recourse to previous works such as 'Arbos' scored simply for brass, rhythmic and harmonic themes are notably recurrent in the gigantic descending syncopated chorus of Miserere.

As one who is well acquainted with Part's penchant for divine simplicity, new listeners will become immediately infatuated with the striking delicacy of restrained melody and contrapuntal purity heard throughout all tracks in this compilation.
This is devotional music by a devotional man but do not be mislead by the apparently pristine and pious intent,. Part is often wrongly associated by means of orthodoxy with his contemporary, the somewhat priggish, Sir John Tavener. I can do no more for my readers than holler my own distaste for such associations, however biased I might appear. Part's music is clandestine as far as one can allow intellectually, and albeit religiously bound, it withholds an identity so profoundly unattainable elsewhere that is almost torturous to subject ones ear to it.

One does not find in Part, the pastoral reconcilement nor the vexatious Avant Gardism that might be expected from an Eastern European War Child. The silence, indeed the echo of nothingness imbued in that swarthy, infinite space is intoxicating to the very pinnacle of obsession.

What one is able to attain is the diaphanous awareness of a profound absence. However this absence is interpreted is, ultimately, the prerogative of the listener.