Time was when modern classical music enjoyed the same popularity as having your teeth extracted without anaesthetic.

The atonality of works by high modernists such as John Cage propelled a generation into the arms of jazz and rock, an embrace from which few bothered to extricate themselves.

But hey, someone must have been listening. Cage's Sonata No5 for prepared piano was, under the fingers of the Sinfonietta's John Constable, a distilled cocktail of funk and hip-hop rhythms. It was composed in the early 1940s.

While the art deco architecture of the Pavilion has taken on the sepia tones of heritage, Cage's sonatas sounds shockingly fresh.

Five of these were the spice in a glorious menu of chamber works presented by the UK's foremost contemporary band.

The composer Howard Skempton introduced his own trio, called Pavilion. He didn't explain why the mournful beauty of this piece was at odds with the breezy cheerfulness of the De La Warr, which it celebrates, but it was gorgeous, so do we care?

Debussy's Sonata For Flute, Violin And Harp ended the first half with a fusion of old. After the interval, clarinettist Mark van de Wiel played with a troupe of taped clarinets in Steve Reich's New York Counterpoint, a maximally complex piece of minimalism that induced a state of trance - which was swept away by Stravinsky's Suite From The Soldier's Tale. That got everyone up boogying.

I'm joking. This was a classical concert. But the Sinfonietta soloists made this piece shake its booty. It's time for the generation lost to classical modernism to prick up their ears.