Once upon a time, the Contemporary Music Network had a significant role in British new music, taking high-quality performances to parts of the country outside the usual concert loop. But if the programme being toured for CMN this week by the Dutch-based Mondriaan Quartet is an accurate indicator of current standards, then musical quality control has gone out of the window.
Technically, the Mondriaan is a fine ensemble, with a 20-year track record of playing contemporary music. However, this woefully conceived concert should never have happened. The novelty - these days it seems CMN tours must have a novelty - is the British debut of a newly invented instrument, the octachord, which its inventor, Robert Pravda, plays with the quartet in John de Simone's specially commissioned Deus Ex Machina.
The octachord looks striking: the player presses buttons on something the size and shape of a metallic bassoon, while balls run up and down wires on a contraption like a giant executive toy. The sounds it produces, though, are shockingly banal: unarticulated continuums that recall sometimes a washing machine, sometimes a circular saw. It's hard to imagine how it could be combined usefully with conventional instruments. Alongside a string quartet, it merely sounds grotesque.
That is just about the evening's low point, although Toek Numan's Stringtones, a combination of motoric string textures and projected video footage with all the artistic merit of a lava lamp, runs it close.
Richard Ayres's new work briefly raises the spirits. At least his No 38, three miniatures for string quartet, doesn't take itself too seriously: at one point in the first movement, the cellist puts his instrument across his knees and strums.
These works were framed by two pieces of John Zorn's. Cat o' Nine Tails is one of his exercises in the grammar and syntax of cartoon music, while The Dead Man is apparently a musical enactment of a sadomasochistic session. However, the rhetoric of its sequence of 13 miniatures is pretty conventional - more M&S than S&M, really.
· At Turner Sims, Southampton, tonight. Box office: 023-8059 5151. Then touring.
