Piccola musica notturna - Dallapiccola

Pocahontas Suite - Carter

Les offrandes oubliees - Messiaen

Three Places in New England - Ives

Shurely shome mishtake! RTE has chosen to follow up the series of free, one-hour "Explorer" concerts, launched last year, with a new series. The new name is "Explorer/Horizons", advertised as a series of "five concerts focusing on international trends in contemporary music". And what is representing these trends? Four works from 1954, 1939, 1930 and - I'm not joking - a work completed during the first World War!

The public, which had responded with enthusiasm - and in numbers - to last year's offerings, appeared reluctant to be taken in by the failure of nerve. At the NCH on Tuesday, both audience size and enthusiasm at the first Explorer/Horizons concert of the new millennium were significantly down on the opening concert of last year.

The programme, far from illustrating anything as interesting as a trend in contemporary music, had at its centre two pieces from the 1930s written by Olivier Messiaen and Elliott Carter before they had reached compositional maturity. The Piccola musica notturna of Luigi Dallapiccola (190475) carries a quotation from Antonio Machado evoking images of a deserted square filled with black shadows. The piece is a hauntingly evocative nocturne by Italy's first great master of 12-tone technique, a man who intriguingly held on to his links with Italianate lyricism.

The earliest of the four pieces in the programme, Ives's Three Places in New England, remains the most astonishing. What a piece that found a comfortable place in the RTE Proms and in last January's NCH programme from the San Francisco Symphony under Michael Tilson Thomas was doing in the Explorer/Horizons series is anybody's guess. The performance under Richard Pittman conformed to the style of the evening: altogether too generalised, and with a rather rough finish.

The sad conclusion to be drawn from this concert is that RTE has once again fouled up its relationship with the audience for new music. This is an area of activity in which RTE, after many years of major mishaps, seemed finally, last year, to have found a workable solution. Now, in one swift move, it has once again been turned into a problem. One good point, though. The admission charge has been dropped for the next concert on February 8th which, like the rest of the series, will be free.