Many Serbs have boycotted the official ceremony in Sarajevo marking the 100th anniversary of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, which sparked the first world war.

Both Serbia's leaders and Bosnian Serbs, who see the archduke's killer, Gavrilo Princip, as a hero, refused to attend events on Saturday. The centrepiece of the commemorations will be a concert by the Vienna Philharmonic orchestra in the Bosnian capital, where the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne was shot dead on 28 June 1914.

The assassination set in motion a chain of events that led to British, French and Russian forces facing their German, Austro-Hungarian and Turkish counterparts in a war that killed 10 million soldiers and redrew the world map. Its conclusion also helped create the conditions in which political extremism thrived in Europe, eventually giving rise to Nazism in Germany and the second world war.

Serbs said they were angry at what they saw as an attempt to link the first world war and the later conflict which saw the disintegration of the former Yugoslavia – and to put the blame on them. Princip was a Bosnian Serb who killed the Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, because they were members of the Habsburg dynasty which he and his five accomplices regarded as occupiers.

Associated Press reported that Serbian leaders said they would instead re-enact the shooting and Princip's trial in the eastern Drina river town of Visegrad, the scene of some of the worst atrocities of the 1992-95 war by Bosnian Serb forces driving out Muslim Bosniaks. On Friday, Serbs unveiled a two-metre bronze statue of Princip in eastern Sarajevo.

The Vienna Philharmonic's was to perform a repertoire harking back to the days of the Habsburg Empire, including Haydn, Schubert, Berg and Brahms. The concert will take place in the restored City Hall, known as Vijecnica, where Ferdinand attended a reception on shortly before his assassination.

"This is a symbolic concert in a symbolic location," Professor Clemens Hellsberg, the orchestra's president and first violin, said. "We want to provide a vision of a common future in peace."

The conductor Franz Welser-Most noted that the Austrian composer Alban Berg was in favour of the first world war. But despite that, the Three Pieces for Orchestra that he wrote at the time and was to be performed on Saturday "describes the marching to war and what disaster it brings".

Asked about the significance of a Viennese orchestra marking the event, Welser-Most said: "You should not deny the burden of history". The message, he said, was "never again".

Commenting on the absence of official Serb representatives from the Sarajevo commemoration, the city's Croat mayor, Ivo Komsic, told reporters: "They demonstrate their attitude not to the past but to the future".

However, the Bosnian Serb historian and diplomat Slobodan Soja told Agence France-Presse: "It would have been impossible to bring everyone [Serbs, Muslims and Croats] together on June 28 in Sarajevo."