Late in life, Handel is said to have wept when he heard his own Total Eclipse, from the oratorio Samson.

How overwhelming must the line “No Sun, no Moon, all dark amidst the Blaze of Noon” have felt to the elderly composer, now blind and eclipsed in his own world of darkness?

This short, hearfelt aria, with “Thus when the sun” from the same work, formed the emotional still point of a concert by the pioneering and talented Britten Sinfonia, loosely themed on night, dreams, sleeping, waking, death.

The evening was devised by tenor Mark Padmore who, after his explorations of Bach’s Passions, is gaining a parallel reputation as a programme maker of imagination and perception.

Katie Mitchell provided a simple, effective staging: lighting was low, musicians moved to their places with minimal fuss so each piece followed without interruption.

Few works are more melancholy than Britten’s Lachrymae, a plangent meditation for viola and orchestra on John Dowland’s lute-song Flow My Tears.

The Ukrainian Maxim Rysanov was the bewitching soloist, who also featured in John Woolrich’s Ulysses Awakes, an answering echo in atmosphere and colour to the Britten.

Playing close to the finger-board, or on the bridge, he achieves a tone quality that is ghostly, almost incorporeal.

At the start, Stravinsky’s tiny Fanfare for the New Theatre (1964) sounded a brisk, arresting reveille.

Two trumpets wrestled atonally in energetic dialogue, leading straight into Harrison Birtwistle’s Prologue (1971).

The agonised words are those of Aeschylus’s Night Watchman, exhausted and waiting for the return of Agamemnon from the Trojan Wars.

Padmore, surrounded by six solo instruments, gave powerful utterance to this plea for release from vigil, ending with the unaccompanied imprecation: “A man’s will nurses hope”.

Britten’s Nocturne, for tenor and ensemble, was written for Peter Pears in 1958.

This fine cycle sets contrasting poems by Wordsworth, Keats and others in magical dialogue with solo instruments — glissandoing harp, disturbingly chromatic timpani, urgent, explosive bassoon.

Padmore’s great gift, apart from his prodigious technical ability, whether to float a line with perfect legato or to enter pianissimo at the top of his range, is to sing from the soul.

Joviality has its place in music but its most life-enhancing consolations often derive from the darkest materials.

To be broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on Monday 3 November at 7pm.