You rarely use the words “twerking” and “classical music” in the same sentence.

But that’s the only way to describe a controversial new music video that fuses a piece of classical music with a gyrating, scantily clad Korean dance troupe.

The eye-popping video was masterminded by a Belgian classical music festival in a bid to bring a century-old symphony to new ears.

It seems to have worked — the clip has racked up more than 1.7 million views in the past week.

“It is indeed a very different clip than your average YouTube clip,” explained Frank Peters, a Dutch classical pianist and the spokesperson for the B-Classic music festival, in a short documentary accompanying the music video.

“I’m not convinced that youth are uninterested in classical music. I think that it’s simply more difficult for them to discover,” said Sam De Bruyn, a radio DJ in Brussels, in the documentary.

Because YouTube has become an essential engine for discovering and listening to music, an engaging music video is essential to grabbing people’s attention, De Bruyn said.

So the B-Classic music festival commissioned director Raf Reyntjens to make the video with Korean pop-dance group Waveya, who are YouTube stars in their own right.

Unlike the pop songs they normally move to, the dancers are twerking to the fourth movement of Czech composer Antonin Dvorak’s Symphony No. 9 in E Minor, which was composed in 1893 and premiered in New York City.

A talented composer, Dvorak, who lived from 1841 to 1904, was a rock star in his day.

“Everywhere he went, something happened, the atmosphere changed, and people were enraptured and moved by his music,” Peters said.

The video tries to reignite that popularity with a new generation. But not everyone thinks classical twerking is an appropriate combination.

“It comes across as hollow and trashy,” writes Michael Vincent on the classical music blog Musical Toronto.

Other commenters argue classical music doesn’t need to resort to modern dance moves to stay relevant.

“The two just don’t connect for me and, to be honest, it feels somewhat embarrassing,” writes Clyde Smith on Hypebot.

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Smith even argues that the dance moves aren’t technically twerking — though the video’s producer says they specifically chose the dance move as a contemporary YouTube trend.

Regardless, the critics might be in for more disappointing videos — B-Classic is calling on people to create their own Classical Comeback videos “to give classical music the audience it deserves.”