Style galant

Alternative Stage Founding Donor

Major Sponsor of the Greek National Opera

The successful Baroque Music Festival is returning to the Greek National Opera Alternative Stage at the SNFCC, with the theme The Age of Transitions, on 16, 20, 21, and 22 November 2025. This year’s programme, curated by versatile and highly prolific artist Dimos Goudaroulis, focuses on the captivating music of the 18th century. It highlights the significant and constant shifts in style that mark this particularly fertile period, from the late Baroque era to the full bloom of Classicism. The Festival is realized in collaboration with the Thessaloniki Concert Hall.

The Festival features four concerts that cover the entire 18th century through a diverse programme. It begins with Antonio Vivaldi’s famous Four Seasons, a piece that was released exactly three hundred years ago, in 1725; it then explores the galant style of Georg Philipp Telemann and Louis-Gabriel Guillemain’s music; next, it revisits the “Sturm und Drang” music by Carl Philipp Emmanuel Bach, along with the preclassical style of Johann Christian Bach; afterward, it dives into Classicism with sophisticated works by Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart; and finally, it reaches the late 18th century, showcasing Opus No. 1 by the young Ludwig van Beethoven, which heralds the dawning of a new era.

The 2025 Baroque Music Festival welcomes the Festival’s Baroque Orchestra, featuring prominent musicians from the Greek Baroque scene; the internationally acclaimed Spanish violinist Lina Tur Bonet, one of the most expressive and versatile violinists of the modern era and one of the most important and influential artists of our time; and the French cellist, gambist, and maestro Christophe Coin, who boasts a decades-long international career with a significant impact in the field of Early Music.

Style galant

Four exceptional musicians will present a programme dedicated to the style galant – the “noble” style that signals a stylistic and temporal shift from the late Baroque era to Classicism, characterized by a sense of nobility and a quality of lightness, as well as by a return to harmonic simplicity and melody.

This chamber music concert of extraordinary beauty and sophistication will feature compositions written for the four beloved instruments of the first half of the 18th century. These include pieces by the prolific composer Georg Philipp Telemann, the practically unknown in our time French violinist and composer Louis-Gabriel Guillemain, the Bohemian violinist and composer František Benda, and the master builder of Classicism, Josef Haydn.

The production “Baroque Music Festival: The Age of Transitions” is part of the GNO Alternative Stage’s unit of programming titled “CYCLE OF THEMATIC CONCERTS”, which falls under the ACT “FESTIVAL EVENTS OF THE GNO ALTERNATIVE STAGE 2024-2025” » (MIS 6002467) with code 2024ΕΠ08570049 (Priority: “Fostering regional social cohesion through the enhancement of mechanisms and infrastructure to support employment, education, health care and socioeconomic inclusion” of the programme “Attica 2021-2027) and is co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) and National Resources.