Up the Chart in Dirge-Like Fashion : Music: Radio airplay is credited with pushing Henryk Gorecki’s 16-year-old symphony into Billboard’s classical Top 10.

A 16-year-old symphony of dirges by a reclusive and little-known Polish composer would seem implausible material for a chart-topping record here, but that has been the case this year for Henryk Gorecki and his Symphony No. 3. The Elektra Nonesuch disc from soprano Dawn Upshaw, conductor David Zinman and the London Sinfonietta emerged on the classical charts in June and has been firmly ensconced in the middle of the Billboard Top 10 ever since.

A crucial element in this unlikely success story has been radio airplay. Released at the end of April with a sophisticated push that included bringing the composer to New York for some tasteful hype, the disc was quickly championed by public radio stations, including in Los Angeles KUSC and, particularly, KCRW.

“I remember the morning that it came in, I threw it on the air immediately,” says Chris Douridas, KCRW music director and host of the “Morning Becomes Eclectic” program. “When Dawn Upshaw began singing, the phone began ringing. We got 15 calls before it was finished. That’s extraordinary.”

More startling yet was the response when the recording was offered as a bonus in the station’s August pledge drive.

“The recording was our classical pick, and it worked incredibly well,” Douridas says. “It surprised everybody, especially Elektra. They weren’t ready for it. I asked Danny Kahn, senior director of product development there, how many he thought we could move, and he said, ‘Probably not more than 500.’ ‘Are you sitting down?’ I asked. ‘We’ve sold 1,600.’ And that wasn’t counting 210 cassettes. It was more than any other in the drive.”

By way of comparison, Douridas notes that the previous high for a classical pledge bonus was 600 copies of a disc from the popular Kronos Quartet. Elektra Nonesuch will not disclose specific numbers, but a representative says the Gorecki Third has sold “well into five figures” in a business where 5,000 represents real success.

The recording has also recently hit the upper echelon of London’s classical charts, again pushed by heavy radio play. Elektra Nonesuch reports selling 1,000 units there in one day.

Subtitled “Symphony of Sorrowful Songs,” the 53-minute piece uses three Polish texts of mourning and lament. Gorecki has been interested in the Polish past--his Second Symphony quotes from Copernicus and 14th-Century texts--and traditional materials play a big role in this modally austere, formally inventive elegy.

Underpinning the soaring songs is an often complex web of recursive lines. The connection to post-modern minimalist styles is clear, but the effect is of long-spanned contemplation rather than chugging pulse.

It forms a perfect context for Upshaw’s clear, shimmering singing, which many cite as the first attraction of this recording. Two earlier recordings of the symphony, after all, are still in catalogues without having made much impression on a larger audience.

“The previous recordings are Slavic, with very heavy singing,” Zinman says. “The thing that makes this one work is the purity. Dawn is afraid she doesn’t have a heavy enough voice to do it in concert, but the beauty of the recording is that she is just singing so simply.”

Those earlier recordings did at least build a small cult of fans, among them Bob Hurwitz, senior vice president and general manager of Elektra Nonesuch. He thought it would be a good piece for Upshaw, who had done a wondrous and widely acclaimed recording for the label of Barber’s “Knoxville, Summer of 1915” and other pieces, with Zinman conducting.

“I’ve known Bob Hurwitz for years and years,” Zinman says. “One day we were sitting down over coffee, and he said, ‘Do you know Gorecki’s Third Symphony?’ ‘Well, yes,’ I said, because Christopher Rouse, our composer in residence (at the Baltimore Symphony), was a great fan of the piece. We discussed which orchestras could do the recording, and we chose a London orchestra because Gorecki could come to London and supervise the performance.”

The success of the project is not completely surprising to Zinman, who will be here next month to conduct the Los Angeles Philharmonic in three performances of another intense contemporary symphonic elegy, John Corigliano’s Symphony No. 1.

“I didn’t think it would go this far, but I knew it would sell very well,” he says, “because it’s so beautiful and appealing to all types of people. Even those who don’t listen to classical music enjoy it.”

Zinman is planning to open the Baltimore Symphony season with the piece next year, and performances are becoming more common for Gorecki now, presenting new but not unwelcome challenges to the composer.

“The problem is that the composer is confronted with a new situation,” says David Huntley, a vice president at the Boosey & Hawkes publishing company now issuing his music. “He was not much performed before, and in the habit of spending a lot of time on a score, making sure all the details were correct.”

Gorecki’s most recent piece, “Concerto-Cantata,” was given its premiere last month in Amsterdam by flutist Carol Wincenc with Eri Klas leading the Dutch Radio Orchestra. His next is a piece for the Schoenberg Ensemble, to be given at the Holland Festival in June.

Boosey & Hawkes has just released a pocket edition of the Third Symphony score, and Argo/London has a new Gorecki recording due out in the first half of 1993.

Zinman also testifies to Gorecki’s perfectionist tendencies. “He showed me a notebook filled with sketches,” the conductor remembers. “It took him a year and a half, he said, to get that canon in the first movement, so that it would work with all those voices.”

Henryk Gorecki

Born: Dec. 6, 1933

Hometown: Czernica, Poland

Education: Katowice Conservatory, 1955-1960, and studied with Messiaen in Paris.

Career highlights: Joined Katowice faculty in 1968. Compositions have won prizes from the Polish Composers’ Union, the Polish Minister of Culture and Art, and first prize in 1973 UNESCO Competition at Paris. Works include three symphonies, large choral pieces, songs, and an array of chamber music, including two string quartets championed in this country by the Kronos Quartet. John Adams led soloist Zita Carno and the Los Angeles Philharmonic New Music Group in the U.S. premiere of his Harpsichord Concerto here in 1989.