Henryk Górecki’s Symphony No. 3 was composed over three months in late 1976. It is also known as Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, for each movement is a lamentation, written in a neo-modal style, somewhat medieval. The choreographer Crystal Pite used the first movement as music for her acclaimed dance Flight Pattern, which was premiered by the Royal Ballet in March 2017. Pite associated the music with the crisis of refugees and their migration into Europe. “This is really the story of our time,” she has said. “When I heard that piece of music I just felt that it was going to be the right vessel within which we could have this conversation. The title of the work … I was caught by the word “flight” and its double meaning—to flee, to escape, to leave an impossible situation—and that sense of hope and possibility and kind of freedom that is yearned for.” Pite’s movement vocabulary seems to emerge from a wide second-position plié—the position of birth—and Górecki’s symphony does focus on mother and child, the sorrow of their separation by war or fate or death. Pite has been asked by the Royal Ballet to expand Flight Pattern into an evening-length work, now titled Light of Passage, which means that she is choreographing Górecki’s second and third movements for the premiere this October. —Laura Jacobs