AngelicA | International Music Festival will be held in Bologna from May 5 to 30

AngelicA | International Music Festival will be held in Bologna between May 5 and 30, a month of concerts taking place at the Centro di Ricerca Musicale/Teatro San Leonardo, the venue on Via San Vitale run by AngelicA under an agreement with the City of Bologna, with the exception of the Perich & McVinnie concert on Saturday, May 16, which will be held at the Basilica di Santa Maria dei Servi, which will once again host an event as part of the Festival this year.

15 concerts in 12 days, 2 Italian debuts, 8 world premieres, 2 European premieres, 8 Italian premieres, with artists coming from as many as 16 countries (Argentina, Australia, Austria, Canada, Cyprus, Colombia, Finland, France, Wales, England, Italy, the Netherlands, Scotland, the United States, Sweden and Switzerland).

AngelicA | International Music Festival continues its journey between vision and the future into uncharted sonic territory, turning music into an experience that inhabits and reshapes space. An omnivorous, open festival that treats diversity as a necessity and tradition as a fluid matter, constantly projected toward the future.

AngelicA 36, the program

It falls to Brìghde Chaimbeul to open the Festival on May 5. The young Scottish virtuoso of the smallpipes will present her ancestral, hypnotic sound, born of her personal fusion of Scottish folk, ambient, avant-garde and electronics.

The following day, May 6, Howard Skempton (in the unusual role of performer and curator, as well as composer) will give his first Italian concert, accompanied by pianist William Howard. In 1969 Skempton was, together with Cornelius Cardew and Michael Parsons, one of the co-founders of the legendary experimental collective Scratch Orchestra, where a young Brian Eno also took his first steps. His never-conventional style, marked by melody and radical simplicity, will be showcased through an anthology of pieces performed for piano and accordion, alongside a world premiere written as a tribute to Giorgio Morandi.

The first artists of the double bill on Thursday, May 7 open a two-day collaboration with Amsterdam's ECHONANCE festival, supported by the Embassy and the Consulate General of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. It's the Ekhos Trio together with Yannis Kyriakides and Claudio F. Baroni, an ensemble ranging across early, contemporary and electroacoustic music, using unconventional instrumentation. The second set will bring to the AngelicA 36 stage The Titillators, the Canadian group led by Ryan Driver, creator of strange, unique and entertaining music that subverts jazz and other popular music forms through creativity and improvisation.

The following day, May 8, will bring another double bill to the stage of Bologna's Teatro San Leonardo. Singer and sound artist Kristia Michael will present Three Voices, for Joan La Barbara, the piece Morton Feldman — whose centenary is celebrated this year — dedicated in 1982 to his muse Joan La Barbara (who also performed it at AngelicA in its Italian premiere in 2001). A piece described as "sublime, at once fascinating and astonishing," which Michael centers on the intimacy of the voice and the listening experience. Rounding out the evening's program will be the first Italian concert by American outfit Everloving, led by Jonathan Kane (previously of Swans, La Monte Young, Rhys Chatham), who will present the European premiere of his tribute to the music of Henry Flynt, the anti-art activist/philosopher and musician who coined the term "concept art" in 1961.

After four consecutive days of music, AngelicA 36 returns on Wednesday, May 13 with another double bill. Welsh violinist Angharad Davies and Austrian double bassist Werner Dafeldecker, internationally renowned for a highly refined sonic language and a subtle sensitivity to microtonal structures, delve deep into the acoustic potential of their instruments, employing extended instrumental techniques alongside a deliberate paring-down of sonic vocabulary. In their concerts, their acoustic exploration transcends stylistic categorization, sitting at the border between composition and improvisation. The second duo on stage is made up of Franz Hautzinger (quarter-tone trumpet, electronics) and Burkhard Stangl (electric guitar, electronics). Versed in jazz as much as in twelve-tone series, the duo has chosen the apparent contradiction of the oxymoron as a source of inspiration to express what is barely articulated, or even unspeakable, within a pair of opposites. Both concerts are supported by the Austrian Cultural Forum in Milan.

With the concert on Friday, May 15, a two-day event kicks off dedicated to contemporary American composer Tristan Perich, who since the mid-2000s has been using the most primitive forms of computing to create astonishing musical forms through elementary additive processes. The program for the first evening will see Ensemble 0 perform Open Symmetry, a work that pairs the resonant metal bars of 3 vibraphones with 20 spatially arranged loudspeakers each equipped with its own microchip, every one of which plays its own part of the composition, producing a stunning result in terms of form, color and sonic structure. Also on the program is the world premiere of a new, still-untitled composition written by Perich for 12 tom-tom drums and 1-bit electronics across 2 channels. The following day, May 16, at the evocative Basilica di Santa Maria dei Servi in Bologna, will see the Italian premiere of Infinity Gradient, Tristan Perich's most ambitious work, born from a proposal by James McVinnie, an organist who has collaborated with artists of the caliber of Philip Glass and Squarepusher: an hour-long symphony in seven movements for church organ and 100 loudspeakers, each driven by its own custom 1-bit electronic circuit.

We then come to Monday, May 18, when Swiss composer Jürg Frey, regarded as one of Europe's foremost composers, will take the stage at the Teatro San Leonardo to present the world premiere of Clarinet Quintet, a work that in some ways departs considerably from the hushed tones and silent sonic spaces of the compositions that built his reputation within the Wandelweiser collective, the association of composers he has belonged to since the 1990s. Two days later, on May 20, it will be the turn of the encounter between the Blutwurst Ensemble and Finnish composer Marja Ahti, when the Florence-based radical improvisation outfit founded in 2011 by Marco Baldini will revisit Fluctuating Streams, a "translation-transcription" of Marja Ahti's electroacoustic work for acoustic instruments, and will premiere Pir by Marco Baldini, freely based on the Marva scale, a well-known "Raga of the Sunset" from Hindustani music.

On May 26 will be held the customary showcase concert of the Piccolo Coro Angelico, the vocal experimentation workshop for children aged 5 to 12 now in its fifteenth year of activity, promoted by AngelicA since 2011. This year's showcase concert is themed around time. The children, pioneers and explorers of time, create music and share it with the AngelicA audience, taking on the sweet, precise themes of Alessandra Celletti's songs, the post-medieval voices of Meredith Monk, and the Italian Brazil of Ornella Vanoni, rediscovering songs to renew the pleasure of singing them together.

The Nist-Nah Ensemble, founded in 2019 by Australian drummer and percussionist Will Guthrie, will take center stage at the concert on Friday, May 29. The Ensemble's music, born from Guthrie's travels in Indonesia, today enriches its sonic range drawing from Gamelan and ranging across free jazz, electroacoustic music and experimentation. We then arrive at the concert on Saturday, May 30, when Horse Lords will close out the thirty-sixth edition of AngelicA | International Music Festival. The Baltimore-based band represents one of the most vibrant outfits one can encounter today in search of an avant-garde take on rock. Their music is built on microtonality and African polyrhythms, borrowing elements from krautrock and post-punk, Mauritanian guitar techniques and the musical tradition of Appalachia, historical minimalism and medieval hoquetus: tonally and rhythmically layered, complex tracks, moiré-like weaves that unfold into sonic labyrinths with an electrifying, irresistible groove.

Presented by Associazione Pierrot Lunaire APS, AngelicA is part of EUROPE FOR FESTIVALS – FESTIVALS FOR EUROPE, EFFE LABEL 2026-2027, of Clust-ER Create, of I-Jazz; AngelicA 2026 is produced with the support of the MINISTRY OF CULTURE, Emilia-Romagna Region – Department of Culture; with the support of the City of Bologna – in collaboration with Bologna UNESCO City of Music; with the contribution of Fondazione del Monte di Bologna e Ravenna, Fondazione Carisbo; with the support of the Embassy and Consulate General of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, Pro Helvetia – Swiss Arts Council, Austrian Cultural Forum Milan; with the participation of

Echonance Festival Amsterdam, Another Timbre London; Media Partners – Rai Radio 3, ilmanifesto, G – gagarin orbite culturali, Edizioni Zero, Bologna Welcome, ER-Cultura.

AngelicA | International Music Festival

36th year

Bologna

May 5 – 30, 2026

Venues

Bologna

Centro di Ricerca Musicale/Teatro San Leonardo (Via San Vitale, 63)

Basilica di Santa Maria dei Servi (Strada Maggiore 43)

Bologna Tickets

Concerts – May 5, 6, 7, 13, 15, 16, 20, 29 – €10 | reduced €5

Concerts – 8, 30 May – €15 | reduced €10

Concert – 26 May – €2

Reduced:

– for students of the University of Bologna, the “G. B. Martini” Conservatory of Music in Bologna and the Liceo Musicale Lucio Dalla

– holders of the Card Cultura and Carta Giovani Nazionale will receive a €2 discount on the full-price ticket

the Box Office opens 30 minutes before the concert start time

Advance sales: Boxerticket

https://www.boxerticket.it/eventi/angelica-36/

advance ticket purchase is recommended

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5 May ➤ Brìghde Chaimbeul

6 ➤ Howard Skempton & William Howard first Italian appearance – world premiere

7 ➤ Ekhos Trio + Claudio F. Baroni + Yannis Kyriakides world premiere

➤ ➤ The Titillators European premiere

8 ➤ Kristia Michael Plays Morton Feldman Three Voices

➤ ➤ Everloving Play Henry Flynt first Italian appearance – first European

13 ➤ Angharad Davies & Werner Dafeldecker Italian premiere

➤ ➤ Franz Hautzinger & Burkhard Stangl Italian premiere

15 ➤ Tristan Perich & Ensemble 0 world premiere

16 ➤ Tristan Perich & James Mcvinnie Italian premiere

18 ➤ Apartment House Play Jürg Frey world premiere

20 ➤ Blutwurst Play Marja Ahti & Marco Baldini world premiere

Ride the wave of great music

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