About the festival KYIV BAROQUE FEST–2025

From November 10 to 21, 2025, the second edition of Kyiv Baroque Fest 2025 will take place — an international festival that each year reveals new facets of early music through the partnership of the National Philharmonic of Ukraine, Open Opera Ukraine, and the National House of Music.

The festival brings together leading Ukrainian and European performers, scholars, students, and music lovers within a shared space of Baroque music — its living presence, research, and inspiration.

Baroque today is not a dusty museum. Baroque today is a vibrant global cultural trend. Across Europe and the United States, the number of festivals and audiences is growing—especially among young people—and Baroque music projects are becoming media events with significant public resonance. As noted by the Total Baroque portal, early music, including Baroque, has moved beyond the niche it occupied in the 1980s: today it is performed in the philharmonic halls of Paris and Berlin, at festivals in Vienna, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Utrecht, and Chicago, on major stages and in intimate venues around the world.

Kyiv Baroque Fest was first held in 2023 in the format of a French overture, “Rameau / Bortniansky: Gallant Europes,” and from the outset established a concept of bringing together Ukrainian and European music while highlighting the plurality of cultural identities. Following the success of the first edition in 2024—which received broad public and media attention and played to sold-out audiences—Kyiv Baroque Fest has established itself as a significant event in Kyiv’s cultural calendar and as one of the most promising early music festivals in Eastern Europe. One of the festival’s key ideas is to strengthen and make visible the connections between Ukraine and other European and global cultures. This approach encourages the emergence of unexpected perspectives and themes within the concert programs, the participation of musicians from different parts of the world, the development of joint educational and outreach initiatives, and the exploration of new festival formats.

This year’s festival theme—Take Five!, borrowing the title of one of the most famous jazz standards—invites us to open up the space of early music and make it receptive to experimentation and unexpected stylistic encounters. At the same time, it serves as a reminder of five composers whose influence continues to be felt across Europe and the wider world: Heinrich Schütz, George Frideric Handel, Domenico Scarlatti, Johann Sebastian Bach, and Maksym Berezovsky. Each of them is a pivotal figure in the history of European Baroque music. Together, they form a map of connections, crossings, and inspirations stretching from Dresden to Naples, from London to Kyiv.

Explore the full festival program here.