This concert series features music by Ferruccio Busoni, Leopold Godowsky, and Kaikhosru Sorabji - composers often assumed to have written the most challenging works in the piano repertoire - together with newly-commissioned music by leading piano composers of the present day.

Some of this music might seem «utopian» in the ordinary sense of the word - conveniently discredited by its own wishful thinking - but this isn't the rationale for bringing it together here.

Would-be utopias are the thing of interest. Communities and their places - Amanists in Iowa, Hutterites in Saskatchewan, Fourierists in New Jersey. The most remarkable of these places are imaginary. Not nonexistent, but existing in imagination. One can imagine Busoni and Godowsky and the others linked by a kind of masonic handshake, in a place less tangible than a drawing room in Berlin. (Proximity within «Gegenstände» - Alkan in Paris and Liszt in Rome but nevertheless together, and less uncomfortable with each other than usual, as objects of thought.)

Not every fanciful combination of composers and musics is potentially a utopia for the fancier. Thomas More's island is a school of divinity because it's a place where divinization occurs. All true utopias enable perfection to greater or lesser degrees - and the suggestion here is that an imaginative response to the community of music at hand is likely to make composers, performers, and listeners better at what they do.