Hofesh Shechter hoped this Brighton Festival would be a place of wild ideas, with a true sense of freedom. KlezMahler picked up the glove. Chamber ensemble Aurora would play a short version of Mahler’s 1st Symphony, arranged by Iain Farrington, before joining forces with European klezmer specialists She’Koyokh to play 19th-century Yiddish music.

An intellectual Jewish composer from Vienna might not normally expect to share a platform with footstamping clarinettists and improvising accordion players but Farrington’s imagination wove a rich symmetry about them, finding common ground: klezmer and Mahler are programme music, they are dances and they are folk songs. Both make much of the clarinet for whom Jorg Widmann composed the opening Fantasie, played with sensitive skill by Timothy Orpen.

Susi Evans, in Tevye mode, perched high in the gallery to play a traditional Doina. A klezmer musician introduced the first Yiddish item as a Turkish depiction of mating goats. He explained that Mahler had generally not written singalong choruses and this was a gap he planned to fill.

Our heads were already quite full of some wildly strange and exciting music which had been Shechter’s dream all along. Brilliant Aurora sparkled like its name.