The work will be performed by the English National Opera Orchestra led by Russian-American conductor Lidiya Yankovskaya, who is music director of the Chicago Opera Theater.
American-born soprano Nicole Chevalier, whose career includes performances at the Royal Opera House Covent Garden in London and the Salzburg Festival in Austria, will be the soloist.
The production is directed and designed by Isabella Bywater, whose directing successes include La Bohème for the San Diego Opera and Lucia di Lammermoor at the Danish National Opera.
Born in 1933, Górecki was one of Poland’s most prominent 20th-century composers.
In the 1990s, a recording of his Third Symphony, written 20 years earlier, achieved unprecedented international success. Featuring soprano Dawn Upshaw, the work topped charts worldwide and remained in the top 40 bestselling albums in the UK for 11 weeks, becoming one of the most beloved pieces of classical music of the modern era.
The English National Opera describes the work on its website as “a meaningful meditation on motherhood, love and loss,” in which “a single soprano voice paints a tryptic of motherhood; first a lament of the Virgin Mary, the second a message written on the wall of a concentration camp, and the third a mother searching for her lost son.”
Górecki’s Third Symphony, also known as The Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, runs at the English National Opera until May 6.
Górecki died in 2010.
(mk/gs)