"Dancing on a volcano" was Alban Berg's grim comment on the festivities at the Munich carnival on the night the Berlin Reichstag burned. The Royal Northern College of Music's two-week festival representing Viennese musical life between 1890-1938 has taken Berg's insight as its cue, embracing a vast spectrum of music from cabaret to Schoenberg's late serial works. This final concert featured works by pupils of Schoenberg, including pieces by obscure figures such as Nikos Skalkottas and Leopold Spinner.

Played badly, these are works that sound dry and difficult. But violinist Ernst Kovacic has this music in his blood, and he embraced it with a warm familiarity. The result was that, though nearly all the pieces were written according to Schoenberg's notoriously restrictive system of composition, none of them sounded as if they were. There can be no higher praise than that.

Spinner's Violin Sonata was the only piece that failed to make an impact. It is an adaptation of Webern's style, but whereas Webern's delicate, spacious lines distil expansive romantic gestures into the briefest of phrases, Spinner's music is disorientatingly atomised and disconnected. Webern's own Four Pieces came as a revelation: after the Spinner and Schoenberg's late Phantasy, they sounded luxuriantly romantic. Yet even Schoenberg's Phantasy had conservative depths beneath its modernistic surface. David Owen Norris's shading of the piano's abstract gestures and tremolos made the piece's 19th-century roots startlingly clear.

Framing the concert was Skalkottas's First Sonatina and Hans Eisler's Reisesonata. Both works are a balancing act between the alien and the familiar characteristics of this music. Eisler's slow movement hovers continually on the border of romanticism, while Skalkottas juxtaposes tonal strangeness with dance rhythms in Kurt Weill's twisted cabaret style. It was fascinating stuff, and Norris's and Kovacic's charisma brought this music to life so convincingly that we would happily have listened to another hour's worth.