RTÉ NSO/Maloney

NCH, Dublin

Horizons, RTÉ’s annual series of contemporary music concerts, began its 2012 run with a première-laden programme selected by Cork-based composer Karen Power, a prize-winner in last year’s Search for New Music conducted by the International Alliance for Women in Music.

The distinction between music and what one might call raw sound is a predominant theme in Power’s current work. Whether or not you habitually make that distinction, her chosen items certainly made you think about it.

There was much common ground between Power's own orchestral compositions – One piece of chocolate per bar(2008) and No chaos, only organised panic(2011) – and what was placed between them, Giacinto Scelsi's revolutionary Four Pieces(1959) that confine themselves respectively to the notes F, B, A-flat and A.

Though Power’s own scores are more generous with their material, in terms of pitch and rhythm they share Scelsi’s renunciation of immediately perceptible proportions. The measure, typically four crotchets per bar, and the musical scale function purely as a grid onto which is plotted a mixture of pin-pricks and slow slides.

In No chaos(the full title may or may not be an oxymoron), Power contributed an on-the-fly electronic element of sounds sampled previously from the natural world and from the live playing of the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra.

To disguise the flowing streams, ice-breaks and birdsongs had not been the intention, but in the resulting electro-acoustic array nothing concrete seemed to intrude on the abstract atmosphere.

The parallel use of orchestra and electronics was of a markedly different kind in Synapse(2002) by Power's teacher Michael Alcorn.

Here conductor Gavin Maloney brought out the finely calculated textures and sonorities of the effervescent instrumental score, to which the cyber ingredient formed a clear-cut, provocative counterpoint.