Paraorchestra & Victoria Oruwari - Górecki’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs

Paraorchestra are reinventing the orchestra for the 21st century.

With an ensemble of disabled and non-disabled professional musicians, they blend artforms, genres, and technology to create large-scale music projects that challenge ideas of what an orchestra can and should be.

Cathartic and hauntingly beautiful, Henryk Górecki’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs is an astonishing meditation on loss and transcendence.

Performed by Paraorchestra, with acclaimed soprano Victoria Oruwari, Charles Hazlewood conducts this harmonic ‘spiritual minimalist’ composition.

Each of the three movements of Symphony of Sorrowful Songs features a Polish lament, including a message inscribed on the wall of a Gestapo prison cell from a teenage girl to her Mother, and a Mother’s folk song about her son lost in the Silesian civil war. Sung in Polish, it’s an evocative work that brings both tears and joy, taking audiences on an uplifting journey through grief and solace.

The evening begins with a performance of Schubert’s Death and the Maiden as realised for a full string orchestra by Mahler. A melancholic, iridescent, and urgent piece; this free-falling account of death as redemption was composed by Schubert in 1824 after a serious bout of illness that led him to face his own mortality.