The Zagreb Music Biennale is one of the world's venerable new-music festivals. Its early years – the festival was founded by the Croatian composer Milko Kelemen in 1961 – might have been the most prestigious, but both before and since the upheavals of former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, it has offered an important outlet for Croatian composers and performers themselves, and for foreign music and musicians, to receive an airing in a city always looking to the West for inspiration – and recognition. It's also an uncommonly well-run and friendly festival.