The opening number at the Saturday evening concert of the two-day Once upon a time in the 20th century... festival, conducted by András Keller, will be the version of Bach’s six-part fugue (Ricercar a 6), the most monumental piece of the Musikalische Opfer (“The Musical Offering”) collection, arranged by Anton Webern in 1935 and one of the most exciting transcriptions in music history. The Austrian composer divided the various parts into short segments and distributed them among the instruments in the orchestra, thus highlighting the structure of the theme.

Webern’s Five Pieces for Orchestra (1913), a work with a total length of five to six minutes, is one of the most radical pieces of modern music, the pinnacle of an aphoristic musical style that embodies the art of concision, compression and extremely reduced form. It was written for 17 instruments, including the mandolin, guitar, celesta and cowbell. It is in this work that the technique of tone-colour melody appears most clearly: the melody is not played by a single instrument, but moves from one instrument to another, note by note.

Dedicating his last and most frequently performed instrumental work “to the memory of an angel”, Alban Berg wrote this 1935 violin concerto, inspired by the tragic death of a young daughter of a family he was friends with, a few months before his own demise. Performing the solo part for this piece, which gives voice to pain and ends expressing otherworldly hope, will be violinist Alina Ibragimova, a regular guest on concert stages around the world.

Mahler’s popular and frequently performed Symphony No. 4, written in 1899–1900, is one of the composer’s most serene and classicising works, a departure from the gigantic dimensions of his earlier symphonies. The delicately orchestrated work is based on the folk poetry collection ‘Des Knaben Wunderhorn’ (“The Boy’s Magic Horn”), and in its final movement – ​​here featuring soprano soloist Polina Pasztircsák – paints a childlike picture of heavenly life.