The distinguished Irish composer Ian Wilson's recent piece Orpheus Down (2021) dramatises the familiar Orpheus and Eurydice underworld story in ten relatively short movements for just a duo of bass clarinet and double bass – an atmospheric and not unusual pairing that works very well in timbre and range. Both players here are experienced old hands with new music and improvisation using extended techniques: Gareth Davis in the tradition of his once teacher the late Harry Sparnaay and Dario Calderone in a similar tradition of the late greats Fernando Grillo and Stefano Scodanibbio. I mention these historical predecessors simply to point out that most of the sounds they use here have been exploited in similar situations for well over half a century – extended techniques can no longer be called ‘new’. In the early days of free improvisation we might have been excited by Peter Brötzmann's (or similar) visceral screaming but now these loud bass clarinet split notes, which are used quite often here, just feel slightly tired. Overused empty gestures, perhaps, especially when attempting to portray the more chimerical aspects of this story – the monstrous Cerberus, the frightening gates to Hades and the rest.

The first six movements are very similar in mood and texture, dealing with scene depiction rather than any narrative and using almost exclusively extended techniques to achieve this: the instruments as sustained sound sources, air with vertical bowing, key clicks with battuto, multiphonics with extreme ponticello (resulting in string multiphonics), tremolo multiphonics in both instruments and so on. There are some striking moments: in the fourth movement, ‘Sentinels’, there are repeated screeches and battuto, but also some very beautiful soft multiphonics with the double bass at the end. Similarly, in the fifth movement, ‘At the Gates’, screeches alternate with effective quiet multiphonics. But I'm surprised that a composer of Wilson's experience and enormous skill has left quite so much of this piece to his players. I have always thought of his work as tonal/post-tonal. For me the Bartók of the Third Quartet would have nodded approvingly at his string chamber music, and much of his choral music is really wonderful. The loose and atmospheric nature of the first six pieces might owe something to his own work as an improvisor in the duo Crow (with saxophone player Cathal Roche – I'm not sure if the duo still functions). There are some strangely un-Wilsonian anomalies too – for example, a curious section (in the first movement, ‘Mourning’) using a cheap ‘Eastern promise’ trope (minor third sandwiched by two semitones) that I can't believe Wilson would have written and he probably should have edited out.

The best music only appears after halfway through the piece when the composer really takes control. The seventh movement, ‘Entreaty’, begins with a kind of pizzicato jazz walking bass, with the clarinet playing an embellished sinuous melodic line all sounding completely notated. Curiously there are no extended techniques here apart from the odd slap tongue in a short coda. Similarly, in movement eight, ‘Towards the Light’, there is a slow processional of low pitches, the two following each other in a carefully heard tonal progression. The ninth, perhaps most successful, section, ‘The Losing Again’, also sounds fully notated, alternating three short sections – quick chasing fragments, quiet multiphonics with pizzicato and a two-note melody with slow, tonal double stops – then simply repeating them five times with slight variations. As Wilson tells us in the liner notes, ‘Orpheus replays in his mind over and over, unbelieving, his folly in looking behind’. The final movement, ‘To Sing Forever’, returns us to the opening's air sounds with a high double bass lament then taken by the clarinet, which ends rather abruptly after a couple of minutes.

There is much to enjoy here but the moral of all this, perhaps, is always to be wary of leaving your precious ideas and fragments of sketched material in the hands of others, however experienced they may be. Collaboratively produced pieces, especially of the quasi-aleatoric, directionless improvised variety, rarely satisfy. Composers should, and do, steal the tricks and techniques of the best players but then always maintain control.