Palm Sunday. The space - not a church, not a theatre or concert hall, but an intimate music room with an almost private feel to it, yet holding an audience of fifty plus. The subject - Haydn’s Quartet Cycle opus 51, The Seven Last Words, with literary reflections on the Biblical text from drama and poetry of four millennia. An actor emerging from the audience with the line ‘God, where are you’? An unusual way to usher in Holy Week.

A few bitingly satirical News Headlines and Graffiti made it clear what, in Cordula Kempe’s mercilessly challenging version, the subject was focussing on: the search – anyone’s, ours - for God in an unredeemed, unredeemable world. ‘Our Father, who art in Heaven, stay there.’ - and the first chords of Haydn’s Introduction hit home: fierce, passionate, relentless; then suddenly alternating with beguilingly beautiful, imploring melodies. The Bergonzi Quartet – Cordula Kempe, Alexander Laing, Neil Clarke and Peter Wilson – left no doubt that for them Haydn had nothing to do with the cosy image of ‘Papa’. He was our contemporary.

No secure, homely religious faith asserting itself in pleasant, conventional classical style – although all the ingredients of classical Haydn, throughout the eight slow movements of this stunning work, were there: beauty of sound, diligent attention to details of dynamics, subtle nuances of articulation, and a rarely heard sensitivity of phrasing, breathtaking in its breath-giving between these four instrumentalists.

The drama of Christ’s suffering and death unfolded, developed and concluded with fearful inevitability, as the musicians and the readers – actors Jeffery Dench, Janet Dale and Anthony Shuster, equal in their clarity of projection and range of persuasive expression – urged each other and their audience on through the texts of Flavius Josephus, David Hare, John Donne, Zvi Kolitz, D.J. Enright and many others; texts that, seamlessly interwoven with the music, literally threw both performers and listeners mentally and emotionally from one extreme to the other: from glowing warmth to cold bleakness and back again within only a few bars, thus reflecting the stages of the agony of the dying Christ – and at the same time our own agony, our constant wavering between faith and disbelief, encouragement and resignation, hope and despair.

The most memorable moments occurred in Sonata III, ‘Woman, behold thy son! Behold thy mother! ’ where the sweetness of the music was almost unbearably poignant, and in the violently dramatic Sonata IV, ‘Eloi! Eloi! Lama sabachthani?’ which followed the words to his God from a Jew dying in the Warsaw Ghetto.

We would have been left devastated, had there not been – following a truly Shakespearean principle – some unexpected and unsuspected comic relief, and more than once, such as in the scene of a drunken priest who ‘had no theology’.

When Sonata VII had promised resurrection in unearthly gentle, weightlessly floating melodies rendered in treble pianissimo, the concluding Earthquake came as a shock. A shock counteracted, and redeemed, by John Donne’s Resurrection.

A programme that will resound in the audience’s hearts and minds beyond Holy Week.