‘Strange’ is a word that recurs in the notes provided by George Benjamin and Martin Crimp for this recording of their second musico-dramatic collaboration. That ‘disconcerting’ also comes to mind after listening to it is a measure of their success in enhancing the rather savage essence of their 13th-century literary source, not simply by adding references to car parks and airports but by building on the quality of ‘exceptional brutality in a context of artistic refinement’ that, according to Crimp, lay at the heart of its appeal to both librettist and composer.

Written on Skin is about the encounter between a dutiful wife and a young illuminator of manuscripts, whose depiction of women leads the wife to question her submissiveness and creates a crisis between her and her vindictive husband which results in the artist’s murder and the wife’s suicide. The operatic possibilities of this subject emerged after Benjamin had conducted Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande but the horrors of Written on Skin seem closer to Artaud’s theatre of cruelty than to Maeterlinck’s symbolism. To quote the text of the final scene, a ‘cold fascination with human disaster’ keeps pathos at bay and encapsulates the bitter recognition of humanity’s tendency to find hell easier to access than heaven.

Also ‘strange’ is that while the wife, Agnès, is named, her husband – ‘the Protector’ – and the artist – ‘the Boy’ – are not. It’s not impossible to empathise with Agnès’s dilemmas and desires but she is not in the same mould as more conventionally tragic operatic heroines like Tosca (another suicide by jumping), Kát’a Kabanová or Britten’s Lucretia. The characters in Written on Skin are there for the audience to learn from, more than to be sympathised with, and the music veers between harsh aggressiveness and brooding eloquence – the promised ‘brutality’ and ‘refinement’ – over an extraordinarily intense 90-minute span. Understandably, given that the recording was made on the first night, the performance has nervous energy in abundance, with some segments delivered more emphatically than might have been the case at later performances. But the dark spirit of the drama is impressively sustained throughout, with the five singers giving their all and the Mahler Chamber Orchestra relishing the music’s startlingly distinctive range of colours and textures.

The 12-minute Duet (2008) for piano and orchestra avoids concerto-like expansiveness and there’s darkness here too in the composer’s refusal to indulge in melodic persiflage. This is music of formidable self-assurance, performed and recorded with matching conviction.