Less is more in Picture a day like this with a cast of five and just 22 instrumentalists from the Mahler Chamber Orchestra. With every word of the text set to be heard, Marianne Crebassa is compelling as the Woman through a demanding range of moods and vocal modes

Both music and text are restrained, but haunting and spare. There’s the sense that every phrase has been chiselled, exquisitely crafted and polished... there’s no mistaking the quality of the performances.

If the fairytale ambiguity of Picture a day like this is much closer to Benjamin and Crimp’s first collaboration, Into the Little Hill, than it is to the fierce, stark tragedies of Written on Skin and Lessons in Love and Violence, then the beauty of Benjamin’s instrumental lines, every colour and every texture so precisely imagined, and the easy grace of his vocal writing, which always preserves the integrity of the text, have been constants throughout.

The music is precise and almost all the words are audible. Everything is vigorously dispatched by five skilful singers and the equally polished Mahler Chamber Orchestra. Nothing is fuzzy; there is no sprawl. The narrative line is clear as well, though in the cryptic manner of folk tales...This pocket opera may not have the visceral force of Benjamin’s opera Written on Skin, but it’s striking, thoughtful, affecting, and above all fit for purpose.