EFA Monthly Digest July 2026 - Part I
Each month Simon Mundy highlights what is happening across the European Festivals Association (EFA)’s network, offering a glimpse of the many ways our community is active across Europe and beyond.
Read Part I of the July EFA Monthly Digest about the festivals taking place this month. As July is particularly rich in festival activity, Part II will be published soon with further highlights.
The Emilia Romagna Festival (1 July to 12 September) opens in Pomposa, in those flat coastal lands in Italy just south of Venice and east of Ferrara. The first night is in the park of Pomposa's Abbey; a performance of Carl Orff's setting of the poems by monks in their naughtier moments, Carmina Burana. During the first month the winners of last years Fischoff Chamber Music Competition, the Katerina String Quartet, perform in several towns in the region, including Imola (31 July), a place that has so much more than a Formula 1 circuit. There are events too in Forli, Cesena and Rimini, often in cloisters or open spaces – with, of course, a warning that weather might change locations: less of a problem there than it would be in Scotland where I live, I suspect.
Also outside, but much shorter, is the Wonderfeel Festival (3 – 5 July). The festival, in a nature reserve in Baarn, just outside Amsterdam, takes the idea of a pop festival where audiences amble around various stages and applies it to every variety of 'classical' music. Each stage hosts an ensemble or soloist giving their programme several times so that the audience, using their day ticket, not one for a single event, can sample everything. The festival is also a prime mover in contributing to the Festival Forest initiative. It's a day in the country satiated with music (and perhaps a few ice creams).
This year sees the 50th anniversary of the Estoril Festival, Lisbon (3 – 26 July - another venue with its motor racing connections!). Most of the events are in Lisbon but there a few in Estoril itself, like the finals of the Estoril Interpretation Competition (4pm 19 July), and in the pretty seaside town of Cascais. This year's festival present music 'as living heritage', and that is introduced at a free choral concert on 4 July in Lisbon's Academy of sciences going 'from Visigothic chant to the present day'. Theorbo virtuoso Thomas Dunford proves the point to (16 July, Convent of Cardaes, Lisbon) when he plays music from John Dowland, The Beatles and Dunford himself.
Also around Lisbon is the Oeiras Piano Festival (5 July – 2 August), which combines masterclasses with recitals. Six pianists give concerts during the month, starting with the festival's founder, Teresa de Palma Pereira. She is followed by Anna Dedorova, Alexei Volodin, Alim Beisembayev, Yoav Levanon and Paul Lewis.
Two of my favourite festivals to visit in the summer are: in Dubrovnik with the Dubrovnik Summer Festival, and across the Adriatic in Puglia at the Festival Valle d'Itria.
In Dubrovnik, if you can avoid the hordes of cruise ship passengers invading each day, there are some charming venues and superb restaurants. It will be hot, so again much of the activity is outside, the atriums of the Rector's and Sponza Palaces, the terrace of the Revelin Fort. Much of the theatre programme is in Croatian, and even its Dubrovnik dialect, but the classical music programme has some big names, violinists Joshua Bell (14 July), Renaud Capuçon (16 July), and Roman Simovic (playing the beautiful concerto by Peteris Vasks on 28 July) among them.
The Valle d'Itria Festival (14 July – 2 August) stages opera in the courtyard of the Ducal Palace in the delightful hilltop town of Martina Franca. It also hosts one of Italy's most distinguished vocal workshop academies, focused on the art of bel canto, from Monteverdi's time until the 1840s. In the palace courtyard the opening production (4 performances) combines Stravinsky's ballet Pulcinella with Alfredo Castello's 1932 opera, La Favola d'Orfeo. Later in the month there is Bizet's Carmen, not in its very familiar form, but in the original 1874 version before the managers of the Opera Comique in Paris mucked around with it. Fabio Luisi conducts this world premiere staging of the opera as Bizet originally wanted it.
The Schleswig-Holstein Festival (4 July – 30 August) in the part of Germany closest to Denmark and this year has chosen to feature music from a bit further up the coast in Stockholm. This is another mainly classical festival with a vast array of concerts, some in out of the way churches, others in more mainstream or industrial venues. The featured artist, Ksenija Sidorova, is an accordionist not confined to any of them and will apparently be found wandering the streets (though not homeless).
Ohrid, in North Macedonia, is about as far from the sea as the country can make it but its festival does have a large lake to moderate the summer heat a little. The city has an exalted intellectual past, having hosted Europe's first Slavic university. Much of the festival (12 July – 20 August) takes place in Ohrid's big outdoor auditoria, including its amphitheatre and the courtyard in front of the St. Sophia Church.
To the west, back by the Adriatic, the festivals begin in the cities in Montenegro that the European Festivals Summit visited this year, Budva and Kotor. The Budva Theatre Festival (30 June – 28 August) had still not announced its detailed programme for the whole event but Kotor Art (until 13 August) takes over the streets and old town with contemporary music, children's theatre and just about every other genre.
Weissenhorn lies to the west of Augsburg, just south of Ulm. It seems to have the right attitude to music. The festival runs over the weekend of 11 and 12 July and on the second day, in the city theatre at 5pm, it invites you for 'tasting notes', combining wine tasting with quartets by Haydn, Henze and Beethoven. Afterwards, in the castle 'platz' it deals with the potential hangover by staging 'Opus 4 – The quietest musicians of all time, a visual music theatre piece full of humour, poetry, and precise physical expression.'
Changing art forms to theatre but still classical, the Merida Festival (4 July – 30 August) takes place in a town in Extramadura, Spain, among some of the finest remnants of the stage from the Roman empire. The first festival was held in 1933, though there have been interruptions caused by politics along the way. All the shows are on classical themes but not all by classical authors; there are world premieres too, proving that a few thousand years are a continuum of artistic expression and the great stories are always with us.
Over on the Atlantic coast, the Festival Dos Canais (festival of two canals) takes over the city of Aveiro in Portugal from 15 – 19 July. There's theatre but no Portuguese festival would be complete without fado.
Finally, two festivals that do not fit into the theatre and classical music mainstream discussed above.
The Cyprus Rialto World Music Festival (8 – 21 July) actually concentrates on the music of the Eastern Mediterannean. One group promises a 'Dionysian atmosphere of movement, freedom and sensuality beyond labels and stereotypes', which, if true to the spirit of that Greek god, could be frenzied.
Anibar Animation Festival (12 – 18 July) happens in the Kosovan town of Peja. It commissions works in a host of subject areas, as well as presenting material that deals with human rights, I suspect the young audiences will go for a couple of the shows with enticing titles: A Pocketful Of Pebbles and Bats & Bugs.