The London Philharmonic Orchestra under Marin Alsop gives a special concert at the Royal Festival Hall tomorrow in tribute to the Polish presidential couple and 94 other victims of last Saturday’s air disaster in Russia.

The Third Symphony by the Polish composer Henryk Mikołaj Górecki will be performed with the Polish soprano Joanna Woś as soloist.

Subtitled ‘The Symphony of Sorrowful Songs’, the work is a setting of three highly moving and evocative texts. The first movement uses a 15th-century lament of the Mother of God; the second uses a prayer written by a young girl on the wall of a Gestapo prison cell in Poland during World War Two; the third is about a mother's search for her son, killed in a national uprising.

Written in the late Seventies, Gorecki’s Third Symphony is one of the most popular pieces by a living composer. Its recordings have sold over a million copies, have entered the pop charts and have been used on film soundtracks.

The concert is part of Polska! Year, a festival of Polish culture and the arts in the U.K. a year-long series of over 200 events in many British cities. President Lech Kaczyński and the First Lady were to have been among the audience of tomorrow’s concert. The late Polish President was, alongside Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, the honorary patron of Polska! Year. (mk)