Tenebrae (2009)

.....the work’s power and unbridled passion tapped by all involved left the audience mesmerized.

A Hilliard commission, Tenebrae is a masterly, chilling setting of Paul Celan’s famous post-Holocaust poem on the theme of human suffering. Bainbridge’s setting is one of his most arresting, infused, as in his earlier setting of Primo Levi, with original power and compellingly tormented beauty. As well as the interactions that interpret the title, ‘shadows’, as a “continuously shifting perspective between the four voices and strings”, the finely-honed harmonic sand rhythmic gestures convey both the essence and detail of Celan’s text, which takes the form of a prayer that inverts the conventional human/divine relationship. Eerie, disembodied, the voices seem at first separate from strings, yet they emerge more confidently, eventually taking the lead. Strings and voices move in blocs like finely calibrated crystals, suspended in silences. As in the hushed shimmers of Bainbridge’s orchestral Diptych, inspired by Venetian reflections, sound and silence are coupled in an intimate balance of time and space.

A word for another brazen conjunction, that of the Hilliard Ensemble, the male-voice quartet whose repertory stretches from the Middle Ages to tomorrow, and the Arditti Quartet, custodians of the contemporary string quartet. Jointly at the Wigmore Hall, they premiered Simon Bainbridge's Tenebrae, an austere, Nono-ish, deeply felt setting of a Paul Celan post-Holocaust poem.

The use of silence, and of the strings to cushion the gentle, overlapping chanting of the voices on eerie chords, seemed to suggest an "otherworld" shadowing of the human.