John Cage Town Hall Concert Reclaimed, Sunday afternoon

The final event of the festival was a biggy - a revival of John Cage's controversial 1958 New York Town Hall concert. The first segment presented a brief history of Cage's career from the 1930s to 1950s. Interesting to see the progression from 'relatively straight' to 'quite odd'. I particularly liked Imaginary Landscape No 1 (very early electronic work) and Music for Carillon 1, 2 and 3 (wonderfully reimagined for music box).

The second section presented a series of works inspired by Cage. Of particular note were Hans W Koch's a qubit of emotion and Claudio Molitor's Paper cut - a homage to Cage (and Beethoven of course). The latter included (amongst other things) prepared scores cut into fringes which were rustled by the players during the performance.

The final part was a performance of Concert for piano and orchestra. Baffling stuff, although presumably not as baffling as it was in 1958. I'm not quite sure what the conductor was doing, given that the performers were more or less doing their own thing. Enjoyable, but I was pleased when it ended: my head was reeling from a week's worth of contemporary music.

I'll give it a day or two to sink in and then summarise my festival...