“Music soothes the savage beast,” so the old adage goes. But can music that thrashes about like a savage beast be soothed?

The premiere of Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring” became a watershed moment in musical modernism, not least for the unprecedented complexity and ferocity of its rhythms, aspects highlighted by the composer’s brilliant and original orchestration. Yet underlying the near-visceral power of this music there lies a distinct vein of lyricism with roots in Mussorgsky and Russian folk music. In recent years, various conductors and performers have highlighted these qualities, revealing a startlingly Janus-faced score that often looks as much into the past as it does into the future. Pianists Susan Svrček and Nelson Ojeda-Valdés, in their performance of the two-piano arrangement of the ballet at REDCAT Theatre on April 25, softened the blunt edges in this music, instead delivering a tightly controlled performance that brought to the fore the folk melodism that is as much at the heart of “The Rite of Spring” as its rhythms.

Hearing the score stripped of its orchestral garb can in and of itself be a revelation, with the pungent acidity of its harmonies laid out bare. What was remarkable, though, was how Svrček and Ojeda-Valdés softened the impact of these harmonies. There were moments such as the introduction of Part I or much of Part II that sounded more post-Debussyan than anything else – appropriate given that Debussy was the first musician to have played through this score with the composer himself. The final “Sacrificial Dance” had none of the nihilism, the darkness, even the dread that one is accustomed to hearing in this piece. In the hands of Svrček and Ojeda-Valdés, one felt that this was a dance of renewal and rebirth as much as of death.

A strikingly different view of the ballet – but rendered with compelling musicality.

Darius Milhaud was a close friend of Stravinsky’s and one of his greatest admirers, thereby making the inclusion of two works of his for solo piano – the “Suite, Op. 8” and “Le printemps, Op. 18” – a fitting one by a composer who was among the most fecund of the 20th century.

Both of these early works inhabited a world that, through Svrček’s mellowed touch and scrupulous ear for beautifully weighted textures, harked back to Debussy, Fauré and even Chausson and Massenet. They were conservative in outlook, displaying very little of the future “enfant terrible” and his penchant for mordant bitonality and polyrhythms.

The closing work on the program “barcode (dance music for two pianos)” by Crescenta Valley-born and based composer Frederick Lesemann served as a playful summation of the program. It was a perpetual mobile-like work that charged forth on an inexorable rhythmic tread that alluded to Stravinsky – were those faint snatches of his “Piano-Rag-Music” and the 1924 “Piano Sonata” that just zipped by? – as much as it did jazz and early rock and roll.

What stayed most in one’s ear, though, was Svrček’s and Ojeda-Valdés’ approach to the Stravinsky. Sometimes it’s the new that lies at the heart of the old that can be the most audacious artistic expression and experience of all.