Silvery and mottled, maybe a tapestry of moth-eaten velvet, or the dripping walls of a watery cave: the set for English National Opera’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, a staging of Górecki’s Symphony No 3 (1977), achieved full marks for beauty and mystery. As the music began, a simple song growling on lone double basses, this enigmatic interior slowly started to undulate. The stage took on the appearance of a womb as seen on an ultrasound scan. Amniotic fluid never looked so classy. In the corner, a dead body lay on a trolley. A mother (the American soprano Nicole Chevalier) mourned her adult son, from swaddled birth to death.
You will see at once that cheer is not on the horizon. As the director-designer Isabella Bywater describes it, this is an installation – a triptych of three aspects of grief, three micro stories of violent death and loss. The Virgin Mary laments her crucified son; a message is written on the wall of a Gestapo cell during the second world war; a mother searches for her son killed in a Silesian uprising.
