Gorecki Festival Begins With Searing Early, Late Works

Henryk Gorecki is a composer world-famous for a single slow, sorrowful symphony. The burning radiance of this work is utterly characteristic of the 63-year-old Pole, but there is more to Gorecki than his Third Symphony, which the composer will conduct tonight as part of his five-day residency at USC. So the School of Music began its Gorecki Autumn festival Wednesday night in Hancock Auditorium with a chamber music concert of short pieces for one or two instruments that frame the composer’s career.

That the uncompromisingly intense music of this mysterious and reclusive composer has gotten under the skin of a fickle mass market has seemed a miracle. But it seemed less so Wednesday, when his little-known earliest music and recent works were placed side by side. Gorecki’s style has certainly changed and evolved over the four decades of his composing, but there is a remarkable consistency to the man in his strain to strip away all artifice from his art, in his unstinting belief that that pure, deep, intense sound stirs the soul in a way nothing else can.

The program began with the low opus numbers from the mid-’50s. The models in the Four Preludes and Sonata No. 1, for piano, and Variations, for violin and piano, are clear: the fluid lyricism of Szymanowksi, the rhythmic fervor of Bartok and the textural severity of Webern. But Gorecki’s voice is already recognizable, especially in the way small melodic or harmonic motifs suddenly explode with the energy of a split atom.

Three small works from the last 10 years revealed the result of paring away all those earlier influences. There are now far fewer notes and the extremes of soft and loud, of somber and raucous, are much greater, even shocking. A tiny Intermezzo, for solo piano, and “Valentine Piece,” for solo flute, suggest a spiritual intensity that goes considerably beyond their modest musical means of a couple luminous chords on the piano or a couple of notes on the flute, repeated with only slight variations. In “For You, Anne Lill,” a slightly longer piece for flute and piano, Gorecki achieves one of those searing climaxes that are his alone, the high flute frequencies so intense that it sets the inner ear buzzing.

There is one aspect of Gorecki’s recent music not anticipated in the early pieces and not found in the serious mid-career religious works, like the Third Symphony, either--a sense of humor. But it does go along with Gorecki’s penchant for springing surprises. Suddenly music slow and intense bursts out into a kind of grotesque dance music. Gorecki’s latest piece, “Kleine Phantasie,” an 11 1/2-minute work for violin and piano that will have its official premiere in two weeks in Hanover, was previewed Wednesday. It begins with the thick chords of the 19th century, gets into a mantra of short, hypnotic repeated phrases and then leaps into a wild dance like something out of “La Dolce Vita,” before settling down into a deeply moving hymn. No one since Ives has quite managed that trick of circus and church, and Ives is sonically tame in comparison.

The performers--pianists Wojciech Kocyan and Robert Thies, flutist Emily Lin and violinists Linda Wang and Roberto Cani--were drawn from the USC School of Music, and each was a rapt, astonishing performer. Gorecki, so rarely seen in public, was in an ebullient mood, signing autographs at intermission, kissing performers onstage, repeatedly giving the thumbs-up sign.

The only thing that soured this important occasion was the holding of it on the first night of the Jewish New Year, a particularly insensitive gesture on the part of USC, given both Poland’s history of anti-Semitism and Gorecki’s own religious persecution for his devout Catholicism under Poland’s communists. The small hall was not full.

* Gorecki Autumn continues tonight with a sold-out concert of the Third Symphony at Bovard Auditorium and concludes Sunday with a program by the USC Contemporary Music Ensemble in Hancock Auditorium. Both programs are at 8 p.m., USC, $2-$5, (213) 740-7111.