In the May 2014 issue of Gramophone, I recommended you check out Bernhard Lang’s Monadologie XII – the vocabulary of big-band jazz sieved and distilled through Lang’s composerly imagination. The Anatomy of Disaster (Monadologie IX) applies those same carefully honed techniques of transformation and analysis to Joseph Haydn’s The Seven Last Words of Our Saviour on the Cross, with Lang subjecting specific bars and melodic cells to computer analysis, the comparison being made to the experimental film-making of Raphael Montañez Ortiz and Martin Arnold, where found footage is edited, stretched and remoulded into new narrative forms.

Lang aimed to write something that was an analogue to the original; a journey to the centre of Haydn’s world, taking a digressive walk around, and inside, his material to rediscover Haydn’s themes of life, death and resurrection through the process of composition. Winter & Winter’s cover art – a crucified frog – would hardly have endeared the label to Mary Whitehouse but the symbolism is well chosen. This most paradigmatic of Christian symbols is, like a frog on a scientist’s worktable, probed and dissected.

As performed by the Arditti Quartet, though, The Anatomy of Disaster does not quite have the scope it might. Which is not to say a romanticised approach would benefit Lang’s piece – an over-emoted interpretation would likely prove disastrous in fact. Each section – the composition is carved up with an introduction and epilogue, with seven imposing ‘Sonatas’ placed in between – hits a point of crisis where Lang’s ruminative transformations lock into numbing, suffocating repetitions and the material awaits rebirth. The Arditti Quartet’s monochrome palette has a tendency to underplay this harmonic and timbral light and shade, but Lang’s smutched and discoloured tonality, with the very occasional naked reference to Haydn rising to surface, manages to tell its story: the final gesture, an unresolved tonal brainworm that leaves the piece suspended in mid-air, took my breath away.