Seven Last Words (English National Opera, London, 13 April)
A commission from Cadiz’s Oratorio de la Santa Cueva in 1786 led to one of the most unusual works in the Passiontide repertoire: Joseph Haydn’s The Seven Last Words of Christ. A sequence of musical meditations on what Christ said from the Cross began as an orchestral work, later evolving into versions for string quartet and chorus. It’s the latter version we hear at English National Opera this Easter – large-scale scope of human doubt and terror as well as hope and a thrilling closing “Earthquake”.

Haydn’s music is paired here with contemporary American composer Joel Thompson’s haunting Seven Last Words of the Unarmed. Taking Haydn’s piece as a structural model, Thompson creates his own secular meditation, setting the final words of seven different black men, including Trayvon Martin and Oscar Grant, all unlawfully killed by police. The cumulative impact of both the texts – pleading, appeasing, questioning, desperate – and Thompson’s direct, uncluttered musical language is overwhelming.