Taking its players from the Berlin Philharmonic and its name from the architect who designed the orchestra's hall, the Scharoun Ensemble has become one of Europe's greatest and most innovative chamber groups. It is fiercely committed to scheduling contemporary music alongside established classics.
Their Barbican programme tellingly juxtaposed Sofia Gubaidulina's Homage to TS Eliot with Pergolesi's Stabat Mater, both intensely religious works characterised by a certain austerity.
Gubaidulina takes Eliot's Four Quartets as her point of departure for a meditation on the relationship between time and eternity, dauntingly aspiring to convey "the still point of the turning world" that is at the centre of Eliot's metaphysical vision.
Scored for soprano soloist and the classical octet of five strings, clarinet, horn and bassoon, her music seems to swing out of silence into sound and back again. String harmonics reverberate and refract within a void. The soprano sometimes reaches her vocalisations of fragments of Eliot's texts by way of wordlessness, in the fashion of Alban Berg's Altenberg Lieder.
The "turning world", however, contains intimations of the unholiness that man has inflicted on God's creation. The Four Quartets were written during the second world war, and their imagery links temporal violence with the physical pain of Christian iconography. When the soprano claims that "dripping blood" is "our only drink", she is referring to both crucifixion and communion, though it is difficult not to be reminded of the current obscenity in Iraq.
At the work's close, she states that "all shall be well" as sound drains from the music and the "turning world" is finally stilled. It is strong, haunting stuff, played with the instinctual, organic precision that only a great chamber ensemble can muster. And the soprano Annette Dasch, covering Gubaidulina's vast vocal span with a bell-like purity of tone, is fabulous.
One wishes she could have sung the Pergolesi as well. Her counterpart here is Camilla Tilling - unquestionably a fine artist, though her sensual tone sits uneasily with an interpretation that tries to pull the work away from quasi-operatic sentiment and restore it to the ecclesiastical world where it belongs.
The tone throughout is stark and severe, with only five strings and continuo accompanying the voices. The alto is the great German countertenor Andreas Scholl, poised and fervent throughout, the unearthly beauty of his voice affording us glimpses of a world beyond our own.
