It seems that humanity has never really moved “from worse to better.” We invented electricity, the internet, artificial intelligence — and yet the simple skill of not tormenting each other remains unmastered. And as for wars… it hurts to admit that they never end.

Alright, let’s assume that in life itself progress is barely visible. But perhaps in art it does exist? So what about music? Do we actually have any progress there?

My father believed music ended with Beethoven’s late quartets. A beautiful and noble hill to die on — but history somehow continued. And really, who would claim that Bach is “better” or “worse” than Bartók, or that Rembrandt somehow failed next to Cézanne? Different eras, different nervous systems, different attempts to answer the same old question: who are we?

Of course art evolves — at least in its means. Everything became more complex, louder, bolder — until minimalism arrived with three notes and… a banana taped to a wall. But does that mean art got “better”?

Which brings us to the real question: what exactly makes a work progressive?

Why did Schoenberg — the destroyer of tonality, the man who blew up the musical language of the 20th century — call Brahms and Mozart progressive, and not Liszt or Wagner? For Schoenberg, the progressive artist is the one who moves form from within. Brahms and Mozart are exactly that. Meanwhile the “revolutionaries” —Liszt and Wagner (whom of course, I love as well) — marched forward, and only forward. Yes, they astonished. Yes, they opened new worlds and horizons. But it turned out that going… backward 😱 — from Schoenberg’s perspective —

was far more progressive.

So here’s the paradoxical result: in our time, it seems no one is moving forward at all. Everyone is either moving backward or sideways — don’t you think?

We will try to feel and experience all of this in the living reality of the concert — through Mozart’s radiant E-flat major quartet and Brahms’s powerful quintet — and, hopefully, without excessive philosophizing, with a little help from Bruegel, El Greco, and Fritz Lang.

Artistically yours,  

Leon