THE SPIRIT MOVES:

Górecki, born in 1933, started out writing dissonant, complex and uncommercial music, as was expected of avant-garde composers at the time. His change of heart in the mid-70s - towards a simpler, more spiritually inclined style - was not a ploy to hit the mainstream. In fact, this shift simply alienated him from his peers: the Third Symphony was a flop on its 1977 premiere. But in 1985, David Drew of the music publishers Boosey & Hawkes chanced upon Górecki at a Warsaw music festival. Back home, he listened, rapt, to an early Polish recording of the Third Symphony.

Thanks to Drew's enthusiasm, in 1989 the London Sinfonietta organised a weekend-long concert series featuring music by both Górecki and the Soviet composer Alfred Schnittke. Robert Hurwitz, then president of the US label Nonesuch (part of the Warner stable), flew over for the weekend. He too had already heard and enjoyed a recording of the Third Symphony - and, considering that version "perfectly fine", had no plans to record it again. He was more interested in other works on the bill: "The Third Symphony was kind of a bonus for the weekend," he says.

An overwhelmingly powerful live performance - the work's London premiere - with the soprano Margaret Field and conducted by David Atherton, changed his mind. The critics agreed.

"The most imposing work [of the programmes] was Górecki's Symphony No 3, which drew together many strands in his musical personality. An impressive individual musical statement," wrote the Guardian's Meirion Bowen. "The astonishing Third Symphony ... at almost an hour of very slow music, could have become a trial, and for some it evidently did. I can only say that I found it made an intensely physical impact, with its relentless tread and its piercingly simple melodic lines," wrote Nicholas Kenyon in the Observer.

"It really did feel like a major event," says Janis Susskind, who has worked at Boosey for 40 years and is now managing director. "You could just see the planets coming into alignment, that there was potential for getting this remarkable symphony to a bigger audience."

Nonesuch's subsequent recording featured the Sinfonietta (which, as was the norm for such projects, was paid a one-off fee rather than receiving royalties), with the conductor David Zinman and the emerging US soprano Dawn Upshaw, whose piercingly pure vocal tone contrasted with earlier renditions.

"After the sessions, I thought: 'This is better than I anticipated,'" Hurwitz recalls. "'I think it could be a success; we might even sell 25,000 copies.'"

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