Shortlisted for Deluxe Edition of the Year at the Presto Music Awards 2023

Picture a day like this is the fourth operatic collaboration between George Benjamin and Martin Crimp, whose acclaimed partnership produced Written on Skin, Lessons in Love and Violence, and Into the Little Hill. This limited edition of the full score is one of only one hundred and fifty, presented in a cloth-bound hard cover. It is signed by George Benjamin and Martin Crimp and includes facsimile reproductions of pages from the manuscript, sketches by Benjamin and Crimp, and a photograph of Benjamin, Crimp and directors Daniel Jeanneteau and Marie-Christine Soma in rehearsal at the Aix-en-Provence Festival.

In this bittersweet fable of grief and renewal. Benjamin and Crimp tell the story of a Woman who has lost her child: if, before nightfall, she meets one truly happy person and cuts a button from their sleeve, her child will live again. In her search she meets a pair of lovers, a Composer and their Assistant, an Artisan, Collector, and, in a beautiful garden, the mysterious Zabelle.

Benjamin proves with this taut, sharp miniature that he is the finest opera composer of todaya work of depth of feeling, humanistic artistry and expressive rigora drama that is miraculously condensed.
Suddeutsche Zeitung (Reinhard J. Brembeck) 9 July 2023