I’d read chatter on the internet talking up Matthias Pintscher’s 2012 Bereshit, his 30-minute composition for large ensemble, as a great leap forward for the prodigiously talented German conductor and composer, now in his mid-forties. And since those days when Pintscher’s music sailed uncomfortably close to unmediated borrowings from Berg and Henze, this composer-led performance by the Ensemble Intercontemporain, all detailed and fastidious, is indeed suggestive of a vision that is deepening.

The subject matter helps. Concerned with the very act of Creation, this music wisely avoids figurative sound-painting. Pintscher’s representation of chaos is instead mirrored inside the piecemeal unfolding of a structure that we hear painfully assembling itself, sometimes with thrilling undertones of a composer confessing ‘I don’t know where this might be headed either’. Bereshit is a Hebrew word implying different meanings of ‘beginning’: first breaths taken, the big-bang of Creation, raw expression swilling around the ether before any language existed to articulate it. But composerly uncertainty and painful assemblages are, it turns out, an illusion embedded into a score that is motivated by wanting to reveal process over defining any finished product.

Sounds crack, splutter, fade. The piece begins before the music, with a gong sustaining a hardly present tremble of energy as super-high string harmonics (on double bass?) reach towards a fragile ozone layer. Deep-toned contrabass clarinet sorties start to plunder the bowels of the orchestra, searching for a core that has yet to exist. Instruments gesticulate without necessarily forming notes; then Pintscher gradually, imperceptibly even, draws together prominent pitches until a functioning harmony begins to operate. And you know it is operational because a swarm of interrupting woodblocks – in a gesture perhaps referencing Morton Feldman’s Violin and Orchestra – registers as a rude, jolting structural shock.

The gestural language of Songs from Solomon’s Garden (2009) and Uriel for cello and piano (2011 12), immaculately performed as they are, can’t quite match the unknowable mysteries of Bereshit – a smartly imagined and beautifully choreographed glimpse into a world beyond our own.