Will a video clip of Asian hotties twerking re-imagine classical music for a contemporary audience?

B Classic are determined to drag classical music into the mainstream, and have unveiled their first attempt: a contemporary music video featuring a female dance ensemble twerking Allegro con fuoco to Dvořák’s Symphony No 9 (From the New World).

The video is the brainchild of Tim Arts and Stefan Van Den Boogaard, the creative team behind the project. “In the 100, 200 years that classical music has existed no-one has ever made a music video for it,” they explain. “We would like to change this.”

“Today everyone is familiar with music videos,” says the video’s producer Geert de Wachter. “People are quite simply used to them. This made us look as the cliché’s in today’s video clips and thus we arrived at twerking. And then on youtube we discovered Wavia, a Korean dance group.”

Critical reception has been difficult to gauge. The youtube clip has received over 12,000 thumbs up, as compared to 2,500 thumbs down, with a majority of comments appearing to enjoy the visuals separate to the music itself. Other elements of social media have criticised the video for being trite, cheap, and...