The opera Written on Skin invites you into the house of a 13th-century landowner who has brought an artist into his home to immortalize his life in an illustrated book. The artist is quickly drawn to the man’s abused wife, and the consequences prove devastating and revelatory for all.

The plot may be a classic operatic love-triangle, but in the opera by composer George Benjamin and librettist Martin Crimp, the storytelling is not just highly abnormal, it’s also unusually intense and devastatingly moving. Fourteen years after its world premiere at the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, a work many consider to be the greatest opera written so far this century comes to Bergen for its Norwegian premiere.

In this concert performance, Lawrence Renes conducts Benjamin’s hypnotically beautiful and dramatically captivating score while Mari Eriksmoen, Mark Stone and Alexandre Chance embody the oddly compelling characters imagined by librettist Martin Crimp. Expect a deeply affecting commentary on the inevitability of cruelty and the strangeness of love meeting violence.