Górecki’s Third String Quartet has waited for more than 10 years to be recorded. It was requested in 1992 by the Kronos Quartet who intended to premiere it in 1994 at Carnegie Hall. But there was no piece; the score only arrived in early 2005, with a note from the composer to the effect that the work had been finished in 1995. He added: “But I continued to hold back from releasing it to the world. I don’t know why.” The first performance finally took place in Bielsko-Biala, Poland, in October 2005.

Like so much of Górecki’s music, the Third Quartet inhabits territory that oscillates between the great tradition of Western art music and the folk music of his native Poland. Who can say, for example, whether the anguished Adagio that opens the work is a refraction of Beethoven and Chopin or a transmutation of a tragic folk lament? The work’s title comes from the final line of a poem by Khlebnikov: “When people die, they sing songs” – as finely ambiguous an epigram for this enigmatic music as any, but ambiguous only in the sense that those multifarious influences on the composer are difficult to disentangle. If one leaves the semiotics behind, one is able to make the possibly shocking discovery that one is listening to a work of transcendent, soul-searing beauty, in a fully romantic, not consciously postmodern, sense.

While it is true that Górecki has been daring in this way for many decades now, there is an intimacy about the profundity-in-simplicity of this work that is truly astounding: I cannot think of another composer who would dare to write in this fashion. Utterly remarkable – a master at work, performed by masters.