Even before it started, this concert promised something different. First, the programme note looked like an Ikea booklet, showing the means of construction of the piece and its components (six lengths of 2x4, 12 percussion mallets, six pairs of hands, one composer, etc). Second, the players, led by the Aurora Orchestra’s principal percussionist Henry Baldwin, and featuring the outstanding talents of Serge Vuille and Scott Lumsdaine alongside three talented Royal College students, wore white – musicians always wear black.

As promised, the music was indeed different. Composed in 2011 by the American minimalist composer Michael Gordon, one of the founders of the Bang on a Can ensemble, Timber has become something of a cult classic, although it’s taken until now to receive its UK premiere.

Each player has one of six strips of plain timber of varying lengths, each mounted on a simple trestle and lightly amplified. The different lengths produce different pitches, but depending on where and how the instruments are hit, the tonal qualities are more or less obscured.

Indeed, the musical experience is characterised by the way each sound seems to hover on the edge of itself: rough pitches emerge from the natural timbres, producing occasional flurries of overtones, so that the listening focus is always shifting. And as the rhythmic cycles go in and out of phase, there’s also a spray effect, a little like hearing rainfall splatter unevenly on a flat roof.

Though bewilderingly difficult to play, the construction is simple enough, with two more static outer sections sandwiching a more dynamic and rhythmically volatile inner section. But the experience is gripping throughout, as if one is in the presence of unpredictable machinations of some benevolent but entirely inscrutable intelligence. It’s bewildering and comforting at the same time, and considerably better than struggling with an Ikea instruction booklet.