Catching up with Cage

The innovative Crash Ensemble's two concerts at Project @ The Mint were billed to focus on music from Ireland (Saturday) and abroad (Sunday). Curiously, though, John Cage's Imaginary Land- scape IV was slipped into Saturday's Irish selection without a word of explanation. I'm sure Cage, who spent time here collecting sounds for his Joyce-inspired Roaratorio, would have enjoyed his anomalous position.

Imaginary Landscape IV, for 12 radios, 24 operators and conductor, is what you might call an exercise in shaped randomness. Saturday's performance yielded up mostly music though, strange to say, I could discern no mention of Clinton or Lewinsky (the 1951 premiere caught the Korean war and sports reports, among other things).

On Sunday, one of Crash's artistic directors, Andrew Synnott, sitting in front of an electric piano (unpowered), braved what Cage regarded as his most important piece, the notorious, silent 4'33". The familiarity of the issues which surround this work - the impossibility of silence, the nature of what can be regarded as music, and Cage's interest in keeping his own likes and dislikes out of his work - have not dimmed its power to perplex and disturb. Sunday's "performance", which provoked one fit of laughter (not infectious), was rousingly received.

Sounds of Venice, composed when Cage was a national figure in Italy as the star turn on a TV quiz show answering questions about mushrooms (he won $6,000), was re-created on video by Crash, with Natasha Lohan appearing as a time-driven obsessive, concerned with inconsequential actions.

Crash's advocacy of the racy energy of Illinois-based Zack Browning continued with a repeat of Impact Addiction for violin, keyboard, drum kit and tape, and the premiere of Network Slammer for flute and tape.

Unlike most composers working within the electroacoustic field, Browning uses computer synthesis to mimic a super-charged mechanical or gan with an almost old-fashioned artificiality of timbre, and he produces music which conveys a heady, almost giggly exhilaration.

On the back perimeter of the auditorium, I lost a lot of the important spatial movement in the four-track version of Stockhausen's early and still fascinating Gesang der Jung linge. The performance of the chunky, pop-influenced Lick by Julia Wolfe, who's associated with New York's Bang On A Can All-Stars, was limited by Ruth Hickey's poorlytuned, stylistically-askew saxophone playing; and clarinettist Michael Seaver's sterling account of Steve Reich's minimalist classic, New York Counterpoint, was constrained by the fuzzy reproduction of the taped clarinet parts.

The advance programme had promised the world premiere of a piece for solo flute by leading Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho. But, late in the day, the right of the dedicatee to give the premiere was asserted, and, instead, Camilla Hoitenga performed Laco nisme de l'aile (1982), a fine early example of this composer's absorption with the exploration of timbre.