THE EUROPEAN UNION Baroque Orchestra has proved to be one of the more enduring initiatives of European Music Year 1985. Loosely speaking, the orchestra is the period instruments counterpart of the annually recreated European Union Youth Orchestra. The EUBO, however, is rather more specifically targeted at players in the transition between conservatory and professional performing life, and the average age in this year's orchestra is 24.

In the six months of its existence, the 1996 EUBO is scheduled to give 33 concerts, taking it as far afield from its 1996 base in Denmark as Cyprus, Israel, Turkey and South Africa.

The orchestra's Irish concert, given at St Canice's Cathedral on Saturday at the start of Kilkenny Arts Week, marked the opening of the third tour of 1996 and was given under the direction in of the Dutch harpsichordist, Bob van Asperen.

The programme surrounded the familiar, in the form of Bach's Fifth Brandenburg Concerto, with a well chosen selection of works unlikely to be well known to an Irish audience.

There was the exotic, in Heinrich Biber's Battalia, which exploits a range of pictorial dissonance not often encountered in works of the 17th century.

There was the outrageous, in the French language subtitle Telemann gave to his Suite in G for reasons not quite fathomable, he called it La Putain (The Prostitute).

There was the astonishing, in the accomplished richness of the Concerto Armonico No. 1, one of only six works known to have been written by the Dutch aristocrat Count Unico Wilhelm van Wassenaer (for a long time his music was credited to Pergolesi).

And there was the excitingly unpredictable, in the typically bold and unfettered Flute Concerto in A, Wq168, by a younger member of the Bach family, C.P.E.

In spite of the jerkily animated, puppet like movements of Bob van Asperen's conducting, the orchestra's playing was generally steady rather than spectacular, rewardingly so in the Brandenburg, where the body of upper strings was placed behind the harpsichord being behind the open lid of the keyboard instrument allowed them to balance better with the soloists, Kate Clark on flute, Nicolas Mazzoleni on violin and van Asperen him self, the florid harpsichordist.

But the closing concerto by C.P.E. Bach brought to the orchestra's playing a new incisive sprightliness and, in the slow movement, a probing expressive depth which yielded haunting results in conjunction with the soft toned solo playing of Kate Clark.