Shaker Loops - John Adams

Concierto magico - Leonardo Balada

Miparti - Lutoslawski

The second concert of RTE's mystifying Explorer/Horizons series, given at the NCH on Tuesday, was billed as "focussing on classics of 20th-century music". The odd man out on this occasion was Leonardo Balada's 1997 Concierto magico for guitar, a work hardly old enough to have acquired classic status.

There were two actual classics: John Adams's 1983 string orchestra version of Shaker Loops, the work which put the composer firmly on the map as a leading minimalist (it was originally written as a string septet in 1978), and Witold Lutoslawski's Mi-parti, completed two years earlier, an exquisitely crafted work exploiting those carefully-defined performer freedoms that had been a feature of Lutoslawski's work since the early 1960s.

Both works have intricate surfaces. These are often iridescent in the Adams, where the harmonic writing is intentionally static. Mi-parti is altogether more accommodating of the conventional rhetoric of climactic surges. The performances under Colman Pearce didn't always make these differences clear, with raggedness tearing at the tracery of Shaker Loops, and the swamping of important material as well as downright noisy climaxes coarsening Mi-parti.

Balada's Concierto magico, receiving its Irish premiere, has gypsy music as its avowed influence, and seems to locate its material in the same sort of disoriented memory-haze as his Folk Dreams which was played by the NSO last year. With Philip Thorne a soloist at all times more reticent than flamboyant, and the intentional internal dislocations rarely amounting to any persuasive accumulation of mood or sound, this was really a damp squib of a work. Its particular inclusion in the all-too-rare phenomenon of an NSO programme by mostly living composers was hard to understand.