For eight years, Con Brio - The John Gomes Memorial Piano Competition & Festival - has given a platform to budding musicians from across India to showcase their training in Western classical music. Under the mentorship of eminent musicians, Marialena Fernandes, Mark Troop, Patricia Rozario and Paul Stewart, young artistes have brought to life the music of classical maestros on stage.

But this year, the four pillars of the festival, as director Parvesh Java calls them, had prior engagements to take care of - Rozario and Troop, for instance, are preparing for an opera they will be presenting in Mumbai next month. That's when Java decided that it was time to let young musicians shoulder the responsibility of the festival all by themselves. The three-day festival will be dedicated to music from three watershed movements in art history, namely Enlightenment, Romanticism and Modernism.