CULTURE WATCH : Musical Healing

This evening, during the Jewish high holidays and as part of the Los Angeles Festival, the L.A. Philharmonic will perform Polish composer Henryk Gorecki’s Third Symphony, a moving memorial to the victims of the Shoah, Nazi Germany’s attempt to exterminate the Jews.

The place of Poland in the history of the Shoah (a word many Jews now prefer to Holocaust ) is a tortured place. Poles, especially Polish aristocrats, army officers and intellectuals, were the first victims of the Shoah. Later, when the Nazi Moloch turned on the Jews, anti-Semitic Poles were among the collaborators. Gorecki’s Third, meditative and almost eerily soothing, evokes the deathly quiet that follows a disaster as well as the breathing quiet that follows birth.

Gorecki, 59, who worked for years in obscurity, has scored an extraordinary international success with this work, written in 1976 but only this year discovered by audiences outside Poland. It has sold more than 400,000 copies over the last year, an almost unheard-of total for a symphonic recording. Its success, besides being a healing moment in the relations between Jews and Poles, and between Jews and Christians (Gorecki is a deeply Catholic composer, many of whose works are on religious themes), is a reminder that some of the Slavic countries were always a part of Latin Christianity and, culturally, of Western Europe.

For them, “Eastern Europe” was always a slightly misleading designation. At Hollywood Bowl tonight, the L.A. Festival thus celebrates not just a double reconciliation but also a homecoming.