This was followed by Yuji Takahashi's 1994 Three Pieces for Shakuhachi, originally composed for a theatrical production. Takahashi, a student of the late Iannis Xenakis, is still best know internationally for his brilliant work as pianist. One thinks back to some amazing performances with the San Francisco Symphony, not least Scriabin's Prometheus. Takahashi's three individual movements, sensationally played by Philip Gelb, seemed to melt into one another, forming one beautiful block. Takahashi included a few inventive touches of his own to traditional techniques of the bamboo flute, but those were subtle and elegant.

Thing pretty much slid downhill from there. Nothing was seriously bad, mind you, but after setting such a standard, the remainder all seemed touched by drollness. Tadao Sawai's Chidori Gensokyoku (Fantasy on ‘The Plovers') was also handsome in performance. Tame Koyenga played the traditional koto, with Shoko Hikage on the hybrid bass koto. The problem was not in the performance, but in the piece itself, which sounds far too influenced by Debussy — a thing common to Japanese music of the 1930s, 40s and early 50s. Both the harmonies and seemingly incessant glissandos got to be irritating.

Michio Muyagi's Koma no Haru offered the one rather lively number, something vaguely suggesting a kabuki dance segment. Philip Flavin, the evening's narrator, played the sangen (and sometimes sang), Michael Hattori, koto (also singing), with Robin Hartshorne on shakuhachi. It really wasn't much, and in a performance which seemed to need more rehearsal time, proved something of a bore.

The first half of the evening closed with Katsuko Chikushi's mildly quaint Nagare. Handsomely played by Shirley Kazuyo Muramoto on koto and Brian Wong at the bass koto, Nagare turned out to have odd implications of Spanish guitar style. Much strumming dotted the piece's landscape. Program notes made it out to be a kind of nature tone poem — autumn in the mountains near Nikko. Asian music is packed with such notions, but I have yet to encounter a single one that actually suggested its subject in sound.

Flavin then played Korean composer Hyo-Shin Na's A Woman was Named for solo shamisen. Na's music has been widely played, gravitating toward an individual style on minimal score. Flavin came out, made his chat, and began tuning the instrument. That seemed to go on and on until I realized: that's the piece! Nothing else happened. To borrow a phrase from Liszt, “It didn't begin, it didn't end. It lasted.”

Larner played his own koto work, Elimination Dance 2001, a curiously folksy thing that vaguely suggested Vaughan Williams. Most Celtic music is, of course, based on the same sort of five-note (pentatonic) scale as East Asian music. Larner's piece seemed to weave in and out of these two areas, adding discreet touches of dissonance for variety's sake. Its Japanese inferences stemmed mostly from instrument's timbre and its intimations of shyness.

Certainly the most curious event was Masaoka Miya's The Transliterated Koto (excerpt) 2002 . Miya‘s notes describe a procedure heavily into the use of language in ritual effects with instruments. She played a 20-string koto, a kind of double instrument, as she sometimes tapped percussion instruments and sort of chanted into a microphone in a hoarse whisper. It was all rather pretty, although I experienced nothing spiritual at all.

The announced program was to have closed with Pauline Oliveros' Portrait 2001. That, however, was dropped and replaced by a quite interesting improvisation from the expanded Trio Narro: Philip Gelb, shakuhachi; Shoko Hikage, koto; Tim Perkis, electronics, plus the addition of violinist Carla Kihlstedt. The offered some very interesting sounds, well coordinated into a meaningful whole. (No explanation was offered for the program change.)

The group's artistic effort suffered from coming at the end of a too long program of two and a half hours duration. Problem was that this was really a 90-minute concert which lasted for 150. I could sense a general restlessness in the audience well before the conclusion, and indeed, some people merely left early, missing that effective improvisation. What this group badly lacked was a stage manager to keep things moving. Too much time was wasted carting things on an off the platform. Flavin tried to fill the many gaps by chatting, and often merely PR-ing the music to be played. Beyond that, he seemed determined to inflict unseemly amounts of information on us. When Summit III rolls around next season, the organizers need to curtail either the quantity of performances offered or get a move on when changing instrumentalists.