The first, in October, inclined toward modernity, with works by Zemlinsky, Ligeti and Kurtag offsetting Dvorak's Romanticism, with the mostly Romantic Dohnanyi as a bridge.
Tradition and modernity, also, worked together to beguiling effect.
But there's another aspect of modernity at work here.
(Chinen) Steve Swallow Trio (Thursday) Steve Swallow, an electric bassist of elasticity and modernity, has worked well in recent years with the saxophonist Ohad Talmor, his frontman in this trio.
The central question raised by Huntington is whether institutions of modernity will work only in the west, or whether there is something broader in their appeal that will allow them to make headway elsewhere.
The book's final chapter, on modernism in New York, is a semi-autobiographical account of growing up in the Tremont neighborhood of the Bronx, in which Berman presented the remorseless power of modernity at work, tearing the heart out of the decorous apartment houses which lined the Grand Concourse.
But for all intents and purposes, what Barber is doing is railing against modernity itself, working himself into a fantasia of bellicosity.
His first, the 2004-5 season, with 9 new productions and 10 revivals, already suggests a more daring approach, notably in the selection of directors who, he hopes, will seek out "the modernity" in established works.
This is not because art no longer performs a religious function and so no longer fulfills the highest vocation of art; it is because there emerge in modernity certain "art works" that are no longer the expressions of true human freedom and life and so no longer genuine art works at all.
In the same room, the modernity of its work today is displayed in the one-off pieces by Edéenne, a French jeweler born in Canada, who uses just a single name.
It is a kind of apotheosis, seeing this work — mainly from the years 1909-14, when its creator invented and road-tested abstract art — in this museum, whose founding collection centered on Kandinsky, and whose architecture ratified his spirit of shoot-the-works modernity.
