VILNIUS FESTIVAL 2022
26th festival
Music Creates the World
June 4–28, 2022

VF 2022 booklet

For 26 years, the Vilnius Festival has been tirelessly pursuing its mission to enlighten the world with the power of music, always brimming with new ideas. This year, the task is even more challenging: to confront the destruction of the world with music, to create together a huge symphony of spiritual harmony, multi-part melodies bursting with good feelings, multi coloured timbres, moderate tempos, and ordinary everyday rhythms. If this is the music of life for our listeners, we are happy to be part of a bright, peaceful and creative society.

In order to rebuild the frayed fabric of our existence, the Vilnius Festival draws on its close links with musicians, festivals, concert halls and international competitions from the furthest corners of the world, while the arrival of guests from across the geographical divide reinforces the invaluable sense of artistic community, and opens up a diversity of creativeness that is surprisingly variegated each time. This year’s programme also reflects a wide geographical spread: we will hear exceptional performances by our talented compatriots, and also by musicians from Norway, Finland, Sweden, Italy, Slovenia, Spain, Greece, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and the USA.

Creative partnerships link the Vilnius Festival with European festivals and some of the world’s most renowned musicians. As the latest result of our cooperation, the Festival will host the world première of a violin concerto dedicated to the Lithuanian Chamber Orchestra by the Italian composer Nicola Campogrande, the artistic director of the MITO SettembreMusica festival in Turin. In the same concert, we will hear Žibuoklė Martinaitytė’s Ex tenebris lux, commissioned by the 2021 Festival, which has attracted a great deal of attention from the world music community, and we will also be able to appreciate a new CD of her works.

Since the very beginning, the Vilnius Festival has sought to showcase the world’s most prominent musical personalities and ensembles, and unique creative partnerships. This year’s Festival will include exceptional musicians, from the very youngest, Alexander Gadjiev and María Dueñas, winners of the 2021 Fryderyk Chopin Competition and the Yehudi Menuhin Competition respectively, to world-famous masters such as Thomas Hampson and Charles Dutoit.

Summer begins with the Vilnius Festival. It is also the beginning of one of the biggest musical celebrations in Lithuania, inviting you to the National Philharmonic Concert Hall to meet great musicians and hear spectacular music that brightens the soul of everyone and the whole world.

We wish you a bright and memorable Vilnius Festival!