In the final moments of Mauricio Kagel's The Compass Rose, a set of eight pieces themed around the points of the compass, the London Sinfonietta's percussionist, David Hockings, underwent a violent change of profession. Turning into a heavy labourer, he thwacked an axe rhythmically and repeatedly into a huge log. Chips of wood flew over the other players and conductor Reinbert de Leeuw, and Hockings himself was engulfed in a filthy fog of forest dust.

This unforgettable ending is typical of Kagel's brilliantly developed sense of theatre. Ostensibly, The Compass Rose is pure instrumental music, scored for an avant-garde nonet of strings, keyboards, clarinet and percussion. But a glance around the stage was enough to reveal that Kagel's instrumentation is dependent as much upon the visual spectacle of the players performing as the sounds they make.

Hockings's percussion instruments - he needed three different sets to cope with Kagel's demands - consisted of dried buddleia bushes, jugs of water, cushions, kazoos and electric fans. The musical potential of shaking a stick of buddleia is limited, but as a symbol of the windswept landscapes of the far north, this gesture was hauntingly powerful.

The music for the conventional instruments was no less defined by cultural references. In East, Kagel used a faux folk idiom of synthetic syncopations and snatches of melody to suggest a generic eastern music, while West, the final piece in the sequence, contained everything from ragtime to Gershwin.

But The Compass Rose is not a collection of naff "world-music" postcards. The pieces reflect the images, histories and cultures that the points of the compass evoke for Kagel. This anthropological spirit lies behind the conclusive axe of West. A tool of destruction is used to create music, just as western colonialism destroyed indigenous cultures in order to build its own. But in virtually the final gesture of the work, the axe became a mere percussion instrument, as Hockings dropped it - pianissimo - on to the wood. By a deft sleight of hand, Kagel transformed a gesture of absolutism into an instrument of multiculturalism.

With the all-round assurance of the London Sinfonietta's performance, and the individual heroics of David Hockings, the cycle as a whole was an irreverent and moving critique of cultural and musical purity.