Modern is not an absolute category. An idea born today may be irremediably old-fashioned and dated, while an old one can be thrillingly inspirational and fresh. There are new compositions that gather dust particularly fast, and there are centuries-old works that sound as if they were written yesterday. Produced by Dénes Várjon and Izabella Simon, this four-part chamber festival presents the compositions of old ages in the close proximity of today’s music, initiating a dialogue that shows them as if they were indeed contemporaneous, an experience that is guaranteed to take place by a host of first-rate performers.

The keynote of the evening is provided by a key work of 20th-century modernism, Schoenberg’s Suite, a work that is much feared and is consequently little paid by pianists, one that engendered dozens of analyses but far less performances. It is difficult to tell why Schoenberg clad this piece, a demonstration of the composition technique of new music, in the guise of baroque suites, or why he connected the definitive musical idiom of the next hundred years to a genre that had currency two hundred years earlier. Neither the former – the composition method that employs twelve notes that are related only with one another –, nor the latter became or remained part of the common parlance of music. We do not whistle twelve-note phrases in the street, just as hardly anyone today knows how to dance a gavotte or minuet. It will be illuminating to hear how the same issues were addressed at the same time by the radical Webern, Stravinsky, who was considering the usability of popular music, and Dohnányi, who still looked upon the tradition as an inexhaustible resource.