With celebrations of his music at the Proms and Edinburgh within the space of a few weeks, Frank Zappa is looking suspiciously establishment. "I think it's really tragic when people get serious about stuff," he quipped in the 1970s – the problem for any interpreters of his music being that his fiendish ensemble writing needs a serious ensemble to pull it off.

Cologne-based Ensemble musikFabrik get the balance exactly right. Powered from the drums by Dirk Rothbrust, here is a group who can trade fusion guitar solos, swing the blues, unleash virtuoso percussion storms then cut to squeaking rubber duckies, chuck drumsticks at each other and babble gibberish through loudspeakers – all over watertight big-band grooves. They capture Zappa's zany theatrics but they nail his rhythms, too. Those who came just for the Zappa hits (Big Swifty, T'Mershi Duween, RDNZL, Don't You Ever Wash That Thing?, a blazing encore of Peaches en Regalia) might have been miffed by the long stretches of John Cage and Edgar Varèse. Indeed, there were several walkouts during Cage's Seven; even now this music stirs up a reaction. The point was that Cage and Zappa shared a love of Varèse's music, especially his landmark Ionisation. We heard that piece twice, bringing home the impact its lolloping panoply of percussion had on both composers.

As much as Zappa learned from Cage, it was also good to hear Cage in the context of Zappa. In Credo in US, musikFabrik chopped jazzy syncopations into The Rite of Spring; in Seven, an ethereal chorale ebbed and flowed under the amplified rumble of two rubbing cups and the hiss of an aerosol can. Cage's humour was less brazen than Zappa's, but perhaps it shared the same roots.

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