Finding a dark lyricism in modern ruins

That at least is the case with his latest piece, a heady and haunting work called "I went to the house but did not enter." Goebbels calls it rather modestly "a staged concert in three tableaux." Written for the Hilliard Ensemble, the excellent British vocal quartet that specializes in early music, it was co-produced by a number of European houses and also received commissioning support from two schools in this country - the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Dartmouth College, which hosted its regional premiere here at the Hopkins Center on Thursday night.

It is a work that challenges on many levels, including that of finding words to account for its peculiar power. Goebbels has set passages from the works of T.S. Eliot, Maurice Blanchot, Franz Kafka, and Samuel Beckett. The texts themselves are reflections - sometimes thorny, occasionally impenetrable - on aging, mortality, and various dark 20th-century themes, yet Goebbels and his set designer Klaus Grünberg have found a rather magical way of offsetting all the verbal abstraction with stage imagery of immense detail and precision. The combination has the effect of drawing in the viewer at the same time as he is kept at a distance, creating something like the liminal space alluded to by the work's title, at a threshold between interior and exterior, reason and intuition.

The first tableau opens with several minutes of complete silence. Only the ticking of a clock can be heard as we watch four men in formal dress meticulously dismantle a bourgeois dining room. When the music arrives it is a lean and beautifully somber setting of Eliot's "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." In the second scene, we see the facade of a European suburban home while the four Hilliard singers, appearing in windows and in a garage, recite Blanchot's elliptical text "The Madness of the Day," written around 1948 though published years later, in which a postwar world seems to coolly enact its own insanity.