The Beginning of a New Era

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.

The Beginning of a New Era

The Beginning of a New Era is a rare classical chamber music concert featuring period instruments, dedicated to the three most prominent composers of the second half of the 18th century and the Classicism era—Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven—who had a profound impact on their contemporaries and the musical events of their time, each changing the course of Western music in their own way.

The programme covers a highly important and fertile period of musical production spanning approximately thirty years (1765-1795). It includes works for solo fortepiano, compositions for violin and fortepiano or violoncello and fortepiano, as well as Beethoven’s remarkable Piano Trio in C minor, Op. 1, which he created while he was very young and which symbolically concludes the 18th century and opens a new chapter in music history. This will be the first time the Festival has the chance to present the rare fortepiano, the quintessential instrument of the Classical era and its composers.

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.