Helped by Classic FM advocacy in the station’s first week, it sold millions, spawning chant and “holy minimalist” imitators and triggering a loosening of postwar avant garde strictures in classical music. Sidelined as mawkish and melodious, it was all but ignored until 1992, when the soprano Dawn Upshaw recorded it on Nonesuch, conducted by David Zinman, to remember victims of the Holocaust. The work’s religious mood was at odds with the anti-religious dogma of cold war communism. The Polish composer Henryk Górecki (1933-2010) jettisoned the avant garde techniques of his youth decades before other composers dared.

Some context is needed to recognise the significance of this symphony in recent musical history – nothing to do with ENO’s staging but important all the same. 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. 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. You will see at once that cheer is not on the horizon.

A mother (the American soprano Nicole Chevalier) mourned her adult son, from swaddled birth to death. In the corner, a dead body lay on a trolley. The stage took on the appearance of a womb as seen on an ultrasound scan. As the music began, a simple song growling on lone double basses, this enigmatic interior slowly started to undulate.

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.

Instaling Symphony of War