Latvian New Music Days 2025

Where visions of the past meet the sounds of the future

Art can be a mirror that reflects the face of its time – but it can also be a force that transforms reality. What is a composer – an observer or a visionary? A messenger, or the very driver of change?

This year, Latvian New Music Days 2025 is dedicated to artists as visionaries – those who have used sound to seek answers to fundamental questions about society, culture, and the inner world of the human spirit. The festival features five concerts inspired by four major Latvian intellectuals and creative figures who dared to reshape the world through their ideas.

Their legacy resonates in fifteen new compositions by contemporary Latvian composers, who engage in dialogue with the past to imagine music for the future. Can we listen to an idea? What do thoughts that once changed the world sound like?

The festival illuminates the intellectual and artistic heritage of 20th-century Latvian thinkers – composers, poets, philosophers, educators, and reformers who were not only voices of their era, but voices against it. Each concert offers a unique soundscape, from poetry-infused electronics to modular synthesizers, spatial sound, chamber works, and symphonic premieres – all reinterpreting timeless questions through the lens of contemporary music.

Performances feature a wide range of Latvia’s leading musicians and ensembles, including Trio Tresensus, Piano Quartet Quadra, the Latvian Radio Choir under the direction of Sigvards Kļava, Sinfonietta Rīga conducted by Normunds Šnē, and innovative electronic and spatial sound artists.

The final concert poses a timeless philosophical question: If a tree falls in a forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound?

Latvian New Music Days 2025 – where visions of the past meet the sounds of the future.

Festival concept and artistic direction by composer Krists Auznieks.

Tickets available at Biļešu Paradīze and online: www.bilesuparadize.lv