VILNIUS FESTIVAL 2025
29th festival
30 May – 20 August 2025

VF 2025 programme
VF 2025 booklet

For the 29th time, the routes of early and new music lead to Vilnius. The aims and programme of the Vilnius Festival are a direct embodiment of the idea of the European Festivals Association (to which the Vilnius Festival has belonged since 1999): ‘In Europe the arts are just a festival away.’ With the help of the European festival family, Vilnius and the Vilnius Festival have, over the past three decades, re-established links with European cultural centres and brought our artists and audiences closer to some of the most valuable phenomena of the performing arts.

This year the EFA General Assembly took place in Edinburgh, the city of festivals, where the origins of art fetes date back to 1815, when the first Edinburgh Music Festival was founded by Feliksas Janevičius (Feliks Janiewicz, Felix Yaniewicz, 1762–1848), a renowned violinist, composer, and manager born and raised in Vilnius. The charismatic Nicola Benedetti, the artistic director of today’s Edinburgh Festival, also a violinist and pedagogue, who performed in Vilnius, asked herself and her colleagues, dozens of festival directors who have gathered in Edinburgh, whether festivals are still resonant, cohesive tuners of the world’s art, whether we are still able to listen and hear each other, whether we are still interesting and relevant to the communities of our cities and regions. Despite geopolitical tensions and economic difficulties, hundreds of thousands of art lovers fill Europe’s spectacular historic and modern spaces every year, and the growing number of festivals and visitors confirms that the festival network is highly sustainable and vibrant. This is also reflected in the astonishingly rapid ‘festivalisation’ of Vilnius.

I believe that both old and new Vilnius residents, who have absorbed different languages, traditions, customs and habits in their childhood backyards, have that special ability to open up and understand the signs of today’s world – the global city. The Vilnius Festival will recreate Vilnius citizens’ imprints in the world of music, alongside valuable discoveries and news that music stars from Germany, Georgia, France, Austria, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Ukraine, the USA, Canada, Italy, Taiwan and Malta are eager to share with the Vilnius audience. Let’s discover and share inspiring music stories!

Rūta Prusevičienė,
Director of the Vilnius Festival

Organisers of the Festival                                        Sponsors of the Festival