Though conceived and created well before the pandemic, Osvaldo Golijov’s latest collaboration with Silkroad Ensemble seems uncannily well suited to the era of corona. Global in its impact, the affliction is at the same time responsible for countless private griefs. Falling Out of Time, for its part, navigates a space between the archetypal and the individual pain we confront with every impossible loss. Similarly, this 80-minute work inspired by David Grossman’s novel of the same name evokes a sense of the simultaneous absurdity and necessity of art that our latter-day plague has provoked. As Grossman observes in the elegant album booklet: ‘But there is one place, or rather one dimension, where we can feel, if only for an instant, both the absolute nihility of death and the full abundance of life. And that dimension is art.’

The Israeli author, who won the Man Booker International Prize in 2017 for A Horse Walks Into a Bar, published Falling Out of Time in 2014 in response to the loss of his son to war. Golijov structures this tale of a nameless Man and Woman attempting to come to terms with their son’s death into an engrossing, immersive song-cycle he calls a ‘tone poem in voices’. Its generic flexibility – in live performance, one can readily imagine visual accompaniment and staging – mirrors the hybrid quality of Grossman’s unique blend of prose, poetry, folklore and modern fable.

Golijov draws on Silkroad’s globe-spanning roster of virtuosos to shape a singular soundscape that marries impulses from Central Asian song epic, Delta blues and ruminative minimalist patterns. Falling Out of Time is beautifully scored for a chamber ensemble of string quintet, kamancheh, pipa, trumpet/flugelhorn, electronics, percussion and sheng, with three singers: Wu Tong (who doubles on sheng) as the grieving father who becomes Walking Man, searching for answers from his departed son; Venezuelan vocalist Biella da Costa as the Woman, who sees at once the futility of her husband’s odyssey; and Dutch soprano Nora Fischer as Centaur, a metaphor for the artist.

Following a difficult period, Golijov’s career is back on track here. His searing new score recalls the ardent honesty of his breakthrough Pasión según San Marco but operates on a much more intimate level. From sky-piercing calls to the haunting reverse lullaby – boy to parents – that concludes it, Falling Out of Time is a Kindertotenlieder for our fragile present.