The Zinman / Upshaw performance has (to me) an inexorable and inevitable momentum, the timing, air-tight ensemble playing on the part of the orchestra, and perfect placement giving it an overwhelming and compelling pulse which I found completely absent in the polish recording. Once heard, it is difficult to imagine another approach which could be as nearly successful.
Conversely, I may as well say this. Upshaw has a lovely voice: from a number of things I've heard, it sounds to me as though she sings absolutely any and all she touches exactly the same, giving everything a rather neutral prettiness I find more than a little flat considering the actual import of the texts meant to be conveyed. Whatever it is, it is equally pretty, and has little or nothing to do with the meaning of the sung text. She is a very pretty voice and near non-communicator.
The Polish recording has the opposite, no compelling pulse, an approcah or rending of the rhythm that sounds to me inattentively sloppy, while it does have a nearly raw emotional tenor that is absent from the Zinman / Upshaw recording. Imo, this Polish performance is more than a little bit inappropriately over-the-top, considering the resignation and acceptance the composer spoke of when referring to these texts of a mother lamenting the loss of her child, but the over-emotive, I think, is far more desirable as far as communicating something emotional vs. the next to nothing at all on the Zinman / Upshaw rendering.
My thought is that either recording lacks about exactly half of what is needed to make an 'ideal' performance of the work. If the Zinman recording, with that inexorable pulse and the very tight balance and placement of the orchestral playing, could have instead had the Polish soprano from the Polish recording... bingo.
The introductory canonic movement, regardless of which performance, struck me as completely non-compelling, hopelessly academic and completely uninteresting, so failed to do anything for me or hold my interest past two hearings, the second was to give it -- and me -- another chance, hoping that perhaps the unfavorable first impression would change or be wiped away; it stayed exactly the same. Any subsequent hearings on my part, I had to skip that first movement.
