“Music speaks for itself – but is it still saying something to us? Nowadays, it is undeniable that the musical life is anachronistic, focused on old repertories and on the same musical pieces played over and over again. This extemporaneous existence, out of sync from the present reality, has transformed the concert into a museological experience. But what happened to present-day music? And to the living composers? There is a considerable disproportion between the insufficient amount of the programmed modern works and the profusion of the canonical ones, endlessly played. It would looks like a literary life, where we keep editing and reading Balzac, Camilo Castelo Branco or Victor Hugo, and excluding António Lobo Antunes, Hélia Correia, or José Luís Peixoto! Having said that, I would like to leave here an alert for the urgent need of music of the classical tradition to reinvent itself and reach out the universal and eclectic spirit that defines us today. Daughter of Mnemosyne, music is the ultimate art of time: it impressively reflects the memory time and the time of human nostalgia, but for us who are alive, time conjugates at the present time. Not in the past neither in the future, but in the present time. Wagner’s futuristic inspirations or Schoenberg’s prophetic chimeras are merely this: utopias. But they actually reflect the aspirations of a spirit of progress that defines its present time. Let us move forward, let’s be modern and let’s shape a present time in our image. Looking at the past, we see that music has shown a constant renovation, following the becoming of the society and being part of the construction of real. From Beethoven’s revolutionary times to Debussy’s fin de siècle decadence, music has actually been an art of present and has been able to build its own contemporary spectrum. The program of Darcos 2020 edition reflects our modest contribution to the demystification and revitalization of the musical life through gender crossing, fusion and the recant of a complex of austerity (or rather the complex of complexity), which have been negatively affecting the art music since the middle of the 20 th century. This edition will cross borders – Hungary, England and Italy – and will include a series of concerts with groups and solists such as the Ensemble Darcos, the Orchestra of the Hungarian State Opera, the Orchestra of Tuscany, Ana Quintans, Sérgio Azevedo or Maria João, among others. My wish is that this new decade can bring new winds of change to the current music into a “new classicism”, an irreverent classicism, a Pop classicism, a fresh and alluring spell phenomena’s, which can reanimate the musical life and, who knows, sow the seed of the future.”