I consider Górecki's third to be the most representative work of the twentieth century, able to embrace Wagner and what will come, a definitive example of harmony, melody, and singing that, in a rare instance of perfection, manage to converse without stepping on each other's toes, without discursiveness-musical redundancies, without overdoing rhetoric. The crescendo of the opening canon, in magnificence, always reminds me of Tristan and Isolde, when that Wagner there continued to unremittingly modulate, exalting chromaticisms and harshness, forcing the listener into tension, as if they were on a boat in a stormy sea. And then, the ultimate irony, to resolve, at the end of it all, death arrived. And the end.

That magic circle, born from equability, would have won once again, but this time the victory would have been cynical.
All musicians of the twentieth century had to come to terms with that cynical victory narrated by Wagner.
That romantic bypass winking at decadence, a prelude to a change, still too unripe and distant, which would find its humus decades later.

Faith and doom are Górecki's themes, a Pole, an unwilling spectator of that Germany that between Wagner and Stockhausen, between Nietzsche and the Neu!, has reckoned with the oblivion of the human soul.

Supported.

Calm.

But singable.

This is how the third begins, the plea, the breathtaking crescendo that explodes, bypassing all that is bypassable, finding solace in a modal practice.

Górecki too, like his colleagues, looks forward by going backward: drones and modes, as if nothing had ever happened, as if the need to tell by playing, act by singing, resolve by resolving, had never existed. Ladies and gentlemen: the twentieth century.
Górecki speaks because his work is definitive, logos included. He recounts faith and the holocaust, the ways and times, he does so in the seventies, highlighting the greatness of the Polish school of Penderecki and Lutoslawski. A heritage not always known, and here the remake by Colin Stetson could come in handy. And yes, because already seeing Górecki's name among indie pages is a great victory, an extra opportunity.

Stetson is a very cultured saxophonist and knows that much is owed to this work. A little less is known in the yeah yeah review circles, when they compare this reinterpretation to Godspeed you! Black Emperor or Explosions in the Sky, as if it were the revelation we were all waiting for.

Wow, it sounds almost like something from us young people with the alien t-shirt, the gaunt and white face, nerd glasses, and patchy curly beard”. The truth is that both GY!BE and the first Jonsi from Sigur Rós who comes along, know Górecki's work well and have for some time. They know that symphony is very “post-rock” (sigh!) and they have loved it, viscerally, just like I love it viscerally.

And perhaps this visceral love leads me to curb my enthusiasm for this noble reinterpretation by Colin Stetson.

I don’t believe the work felt the need to be revamped in a “modern” key.
It is still modern, like all immortal works. The work on the timbres, although well done, vitiates its message, depriving it of the emotionality that Górecki certainly did not skimp on but rationed meticulously through a pedantic study on timbres.
The final result deprives the work of that magic of suspension and adds predictability; the progression of sounds is flat and at times emptied, at times replaced by drums, electronic mannerisms, and exaggerations that flaunt how “post-rock” (sigh!) Górecki is. Moreover, I'm not a huge fan of the brass section and saxophones unless they're played a bit à la Morphine. Here they were used gracefully (if they had been stored in the case, it would've been even better, but so be it).

I don't particularly love the practice of reinterpreting “without changing much but changing everything”, to the point of winking at the gaudy.
I love Wendy Carlos's Switched on Bach that does Bach exactly, but with the Moog. To make history, you can be Wagner, Górecki, Bach, or Carlos; to make a remake, you can also be Colin Stetson, who certainly loves Górecki viscerally, but not enough to simply dedicate himself to listening to it twice a day.

However, one thing is certain: those who do not know Górecki's third symphony will hear something significant. If you love bands with strange names and albums that last three and a half hours with songs of twenty-seven minutes, here you are adding two pieces: a – nonetheless – good listen (besides, the mezzo-soprano is really good) and a valid opportunity to recover some “contemporary music” which, trust me, does not drag you down at all.

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