John Cage may be one of the most iconic artistic figures of the last century, whose influence, good and bad, has extended far beyond the bounds of contemporary music, but beyond his landmark works, the rest of his enormously wide-ranging output remains little known and performed. But a centenary year is the best moment to explore some of it, and Apartment House's commitment to performing Cage is well-established; the group's concert in the Ether festival included four rarely heard works, three from the early 1950s and one from the 1980s.

The earlier group of pieces was performed simultaneously. Both 31'57.9864'' for a Pianist and 26'1.1499'' for a String Player belong to a collection of chance-based works that has been called the Ten Thousand Things; they formed the backdrop to 45' for a Speaker, which began life as a lecture that Cage delivered in 1954. Punctuated by unpredictable silences and hand gestures, it's a fragmented series of ruminations on music and listening, on his own compositional procedures and on life in general. "There is all the time in the world to study music", the speaker observes at one point, "whereas for living there is hardly any time at all."

In this performance, the instrumental solos provided intermittent commentary to these gnomic pronouncements, the cellist also playing a transistor radio, the pianist sometimes preparing specific pitches on his instrument and also using a toy saxophone and a pedal drum. But it was always compelling, in a way that Hymnkus from 1986, realised in a version for five instruments, never was. The varied repetition of rather unprepossessing musical material seemed arbitrary, not in a teasing, unpredictable Cageian way, but in a drearily remorseless one; its half-hour passed very slowly.