The third and final week of Iain Grandage’s penultimate Perth Festival leans heavily into two of his fields of expertise and passion as an artist and curator: namely, First Nations performance (including the Australian Dance Theatre’s new work Tracker and BIGhART’s work-in-progress showing of Punkaliyarra) and contemporary music, with The Cage Project, Kronos Quartet and Linda May Han Oh’s Ephemeral Echoes all performed on successive nights at Perth Concert Hall.

One senses that having programmed some large-scale crowd-pleasers in the opening week (as well as the series of concerts by Björk that close the festival this weekend and continue next week), Grandage has reserved some of the works that are closest to his heart for this phase of the festival, when most of the big-ticket items have already landed (and mostly sold out).

The Cage Project is a collaboration between French pianist Cédric Tiberghien and Melbourne-based percussionist and sound artist Matthias Schack-Arnott, whose companion work Everywhen was performed at PICA last week.

Both are solo performance works for a bespoke form of percussion ‘orchestra’ which is also a composite visual art object. The works thus be seen (and heard) as inventing a new genre of musical and visual...