Iktus Percussion Plays John Cage at Le Poisson Rouge John Cage's music has never been absent from New York's concert halls, but this year's celebration of his centenary has brought more of it into the rotation than usual, with precisely the effect Cage would have wanted: Whether the works at hand are relatively sedate early pieces, or later essays in odd timbres, chance operations and studied eccentricity, an all-Cage concert is bound to leave you smiling with the recognition of having heard something strange, wonderfully wayward and provocative. Iktus Percussion Chris Graham, foreground, and Cory Bracken of the ensemble, which performed at Le Poisson Rouge on Sunday evening. Much of Cage's music treats the spirit of the moment as an unseen ensemble member, so even works you have heard often - this year "Credo in Us" (1942) has supplanted "Third Construction" (1941) and "4"33" (1952) at the top of the Cage hit parade - invariably yield fresh ideas. That doesn't mean you can't quibble. At a Cage concert at Le Poisson Rouge on Sunday evening, Iktus Percussion, the pianist Taka Kigawa and the toy-piano player Phyllis Chen performed nine works with admirable clarity, precision and focused energy: qualities that are usually not causes for complaint and that certainly illuminated aspects of these scores. But you missed the ramshackle touch of the unplanned that animates Cage's work. "Credo in Us," for example, which closed the program, typically includes a player dialing through a radio to pick up random sounds that become part of a piano-and-percussion fabric, though Cage proposed using recordings as an alternative. He figured that Romantic symphonists would do. The Iktus players updated this instruction by playing samples of harpsichord and orchestral music, rock and funk from a laptop, which allowed them to control which sections of each sample were heard. It was a clever, thoroughly 2012 approach, but what of Cage's desire that happenstance be part of the piece? Cagean philosophy aside, the playing was uniformly superb. Iktus Percussion began with a short, amusing rendering of "But What About the Noise of Crumpling Paper Which He Used to Do in Order to Paint the Series of "Papiers Froissés" or Tearing Up Paper to Make "Papiers Déchirés?" Arp Was Stimulated by Water (Sea, Lake and Flowing Waters Like Rivers), Forests" (1985), using a table full of mostly metal and glass objects, as well as a sheet of paper (waved, not crumpled). They moved with no break into the exotically melodic, gamelan-accented "Double Music" (1941), a collaboration between Cage and Lou Harrison. Mr. Kigawa, playing a prepared piano that produced both percussive sounds and pure tones, joined the ensemble for a focused, pointillistic account of "Amores" (1943). Ms. Chen, in her short set, offered a dynamically supple reading of the Suite for Toy Piano (1948), a study in innocent tunefulness, as well as a more complex but brief rendering of "Music for Carillon No. 2" (1954), using a toy piano and a music box to produce what sounded like electronic timbres. Mr. Kigawa played "And the Earth Shall Bear Again" (1942) with an alluring fluidity before removing the screws and other objects from the piano's strings for a graceful interpretation of the impressionistic "In a Landscape" (1948) and a sizzling, virtuosic performance of the angular "Études Australes, No.