De Materie / Nocturnen, Royal Northern College of Music, Manchester

An avant-garde adventure

Louis Andriessen's work De Materie, a musical play rather than an opera, is peopled by singers and instrumentalists with amazing sounds to intrigue, unlikely scenes to describe and vivid stories to tell (in Dutch). It also provides the chance to display a virtuosity that was clearly evident in this rare performance by the student New Ensemble and New Ensemble Voices of the Royal Northern College of Music. In a witty pre-concert talk, the 63-year-old Andriessen, the focus of a four-day festival at the college, said if 70 per cent of the notes of this complex score were there, that would be sufficient. Whatever tiny omissions there may have been – and in a score as busy as this, nothing is going to be perfect – there was 100 per cent commitment from the performers.

De Materie operates on several levels, and is a cocktail of styles, as you might expect from a composer drawing on an eclectic background of jazz and avant-garde composition. The four parts which make up the 100-minute piece delve into Dutch history – scientific, religious, artistic and political – but rather than the bits fitting together like a jigsaw puzzle, they contradict each other, almost as if Andriessen is exploring the friction created by these musical and textual jagged edges. The bigger picture made up by these four musical essays comes across as being of less importance than the dramatic detail, the startling bursts of colour, and the dramatic integration between the freefalling exuberance of the instrumental score and the earnest, sometimes urgent, sometimes passionate words.

The work, which contains such novelties as a duet for two hammers, a toccata of 144 very loud instrumental crashes, and a musical setting of shipbuilding instructions, opens somewhat unpromisingly. While the choir enumerates elegantly on the shipbuilder's tools, the tenor (Kevin Matthews) in Part One muses on the atomic nature of matter. The second part, however, in which Merryn Gam-ba sang the long solo aria with breathtaking assurance, is a powerful erotic vision by the 13th-century mystic, Hadewijch. Within the slow-moving orchestral tapestry threatening, muttered triplets on bass and contrabass clarinets roam about the hallowed world of Hadewijch's vision, as one of Andriessen's colleagues puts it "like stray dogs in the church interior of old Dutch paintings".

No one boogies like conductor Clark Rundell, and in the exhilarating third part, inspired by Piet Mondrian, the boogie-woogie, funky bass and rap elements had the players slithering and stretching superbly. Against an often monochrome instrumental background shot through with stark shafts of light and lyricism, the final part combines the words of Willem Kloos and Marie Curie, bringing an astonishing work to an emotional end. This is the first time that British performers have tackled De Materie, and it's well worth catching the repeat of this masterpiece at the Cheltenham Festival on 7 July.

De Materie, from the late 1980s, couldn't have been more different from Andriessen's early Nocturnen, written when he was 20. In it he draws on his love of French music – Duparc, Roussel and Chausson – in a mysterious setting for two sopranos and chamber orchestra. The words are meaningless, although Amy Freston's interpretation of this most instrumental of vocal lines was certainly not bereft of atmosphere, especially when, from within the RNCM Chamber Orchestra, an echoing voice wove an ethereal counterpoint.

De Materie will be performed at the Cheltenham Festival on Sunday, 7 July (01242 227979)