Anders Hillborg, 'Composer in Residence' this season, comes from electronic music, has already composed for film, pop and choir and finally found his way to orchestral music through the works of György Ligeti. In his Cello Concerto, the soloist finds himself dangerously close to the abyss: with long ascending melodic lines, the solo cello winds its way out of the intimacy of the instrumentation and the icy soundscape. After the work's world premiere in Antwerp, the German cellist Nicolas Altstaedt now gives the concerto its Swiss premiere in Basel.

If Dmitri Shostakovich's 10th Symphony, premiered in December 1953, had been published a year earlier, his career would probably have been at stake. The symphony was part of a whole collection of 'serious' works that had accumulated in Shostakovich's drawers until Stalin's death in March 1953, awaiting their premiere or the end of their performance ban. In the Tenth, sombre treatments of the dictatorial Stalin era can be heard before Shostakovich hammers his own trademark - the initials D-S-C-H - into the score as a sequence of notes in the final bars of the symphony.

This concert will feature a discovery programme, the schedule of which will be announced in advance in the programme magazine.