There is something particular about a room that is genuinely listening. Not the polite stillness of a classical concert, where silence is convention, but something closer to absorption — a collective leaning in. On 14 March, under the soft starlit ceiling of Bechstein Hall, that quality of attention held the room from the first note to the last.
The occasion was Music of Our Time, a new concert series launched by Mosaic Seasons and dedicated to contemporary piano and the composers of our present. The hall was filled to capacity, the grand piano positioned almost floating at its centre, the audience gathered closely around it. The intimacy of the space made the evening feel less like a performance and more like an invitation to witness something being thought through in real time.
Pianists Edna Stern, Evelyne Berezovsky, and Louis-Victor Bak presented works by five composers: Geoff King, Silvina Milstein, George Benjamin, Edna Stern, and Tatiana Svetlova. What held the programme together was not a single aesthetic but a shared question — what does the piano sound like now, and what does it remember?
That question was posed most directly at the opening, where Silvina Milstein’s Piano Phantasy after Mozart K.475 was placed alongside Mozart’s own Fantasia in C minor, K.475. Heard in sequence, the pairing became a dialogue across centuries — not a pastiche or a tribute, but a living conversation between a classical form and a contemporary voice reimagining it from within. It was a quietly extraordinary beginning: precise, lyrical, and deeply assured.
What emerged across the evening was a striking and perhaps unintentional divide. The works composed or selected by the women on the programme — Milstein’s Phantasy, Stern’s Hommage à Georges Perec and Kidnapped: 7.X.2023, Svetlova’s Madonna and Child (for Gaudí’s La Pedrera) and Sonnets No. 4 and 5 on the Theme of Bach’s Chaconne — carried a particular quality of momentum: melodic, building, at times achingly gentle before surging into something forceful and commanding. These works breathed. They invited the listener inward and then held them there.
By contrast, the male-composed repertoire — Geoff King’s Family Photos: David, in Hastings and George Benjamin’s Shadowlines — operated in a markedly different register. Structurally dense, rhythmically fragmented, and at times deliberately resistant to resolution, these pieces demanded a different kind of endurance from the audience. Benjamin’s Shadowlines, performed by Louis-Victor Bak as the evening’s closing work, unfolded through a series of canonic preludes whose extended, fractured architecture tested the room’s patience as much as its attention. There is intellectual ambition in this kind of composition — but placed beside the visceral, emotionally immediate works that preceded it, the effect was of disruption rather than dialogue.
This is not to diminish the complexity of the women’s repertoire — Milstein’s engagement with Mozart or Svetlova’s conversation with Bach are works of serious structural sophistication. But their complexity serves the listener’s experience rather than challenging it to breaking point. The contrast raised an interesting question about the programme’s architecture: whether the alternation between these two sensibilities was a deliberate curatorial choice or a fault line exposed in performance.
Afterwards, the audience, performers, and composers gathered in the hall’s spaces to continue the conversation — a gesture entirely in keeping with the evening’s spirit. Music of Our Time is, by design, not a one-off event but the beginning of something ongoing. If the first instalment is any indication, the series has already found both its voice and its most interesting tensions.…
