The Sinfonieorchester Basel Foundation is celebrating its 20th anniversary! A very special guest of honour has been invited: after fifteen years Mario Venzago, the SOB's first principal conductor under the Foundation, is returning to the podium. But he, the orchestra and cellist Nicolas Altstaedt are not only taking a trip into the past. Henri Dutilleux wrote his cello concerto A Whole Distant World specially for Russian cellist and conductor Mstislav Rostropovich in 1970. In Tout un monde lointain Dutilleux expressed a highly personal exploration of the poetry of his compatriot Charles Baudelaire. Each of its five deeply atmospheric movements is prefixed with a fragment of verse, a poetic image of the French lyric poet.  

Austrian Anton Bruckner also found inspiration in his contemporaries: he was an enthusiastic Wagnerian throughout his life. Not only did his 3rd symphony contain numerous quotations from Wagner in its first edition, it was also dedicated to him. It still bears the subtitle The Wagner to this day, even though Bruckner revised it several times and produced two new versions, eliminating almost all the echoes of his idol.  

The first performance of the second version was a major disaster. Bruckner would spend another twelve years revising it.