EFA Monthly Digest June 2026 - Part II
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.
For more highlights, check out Part I of EFA Monthly Digest for the festivals starting at the beginning of the month.
There are some places where the ancient name is far easier to pronounce than the modern one for the outsider. Poetovio, for example, in Latin is far easier on the tongue than Ptuj in Slovene! Is the 'p' or the 't' silent – and what about the 'j' – hard, soft or absent?
Sensibly the town in old Styria, which has changed language, population and nation uncomfortably often as war hit it from all directions, hosts a music festival that has adopted the name of its music school, Arsana. The festival (13 June – 28 August) spreads across the town – its main square, archaeological park, monastery, castle and youth cultural centre in the old glassworks, among others. The main genres are classical and jazz with many variations on those themes.
At the other side of Slovenia, in the capital, the 74th Ljubljana Festival begins its summer programme officially on 21 June, though there will be events by the city's enticing river for a few days before. The opening event, in the Congress Square, is the Maribor Opera's staging of Puccini's Turandot. The tenor singing the most famous aria, Nessun Dorma, as the football world cup is in full swing, will be Yusif Eyvazov. As the weeks go on there will be Rossini from La Fenice (15 & 16 July) in Venice, and some of the aristocrats of the classical music world – pianist Martha Argerich (17 July) conducted by Charles Dutoit, who also directs Saint-Säens' Samson and Delilah (9 July), the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Sir Antonio Pappano in Bruckner's 9th Symphony (2 September) and Mahler's massive Second Symphony the next night, and his more sombre Sixth Symphony with Daniele Gatti conducting the Staatskapelle Dresden (7 September).
In Belgium festivals start this month in on both sides of the country's linguistic divide. In the French community Les Festivals de Wallonie is a conglomeration of seven festivals in 21 towns beginning on 25 June until well into the autumn (22 October). As can be imagined, the programme is diverse and massive. Much more concentrated is the festival in the Flemish area.
STROOM (18 – 28 June) takes place all along the River Scheldt between Ghent and Antwerp. Water is everywhere, with many of the concerts taking place on the riverside. The festival is as much about the environment of the river and the settlements along its banks as the art. It starts (19 & 20 June) with two free evenings in the south of Antwerp where sunset will be marked by sounds as if from under the water, conjured up by percussion and synthesisers. In a circus tent by the river, flanked by industrial infrastructure at Merelbeke-Melle (27 June) the hirsute writer-performer Jeroen Olyslaegers will guide the Flanders Symphony Orchestra and several contemporary composers in The Penultimate Carnival of the Animals.
Spoleto, a town south of Perugia and Assisi in Umbria, became in the 1950s a home for the American/Italian composer and playwright, Gian Carlo Menotti, He also lived in a fine house outside Edinburgh and another, often shared with his partner and fellow composer Samuel Barber, close to New York. He started festivals in Spoleto Italy in 1958 and in 1977 in Spoleto, South Carolina. His duality both geographically and professionally led to the festivals being labelled Of Two Worlds (Dei Due Mondi). This year (26 June – 21 July) in his house on his 115th birthday (7 July) a score of students will perform in a 24 hour Menotti Marathon. There is also a production of his opera Vanessa, for which he wrote both words and music, in the theatre named after him – as well of a host of new theatre and dance productions.
One of my poet heroes, who also bridged the Atlantic but 150 years before Menotti, is Mozart's librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte. Apart from those three operas, he started London's first Italian language bookshop and was the first Professor of Italian at Columbia University in New York. He died there 200 years ago this year. He wrote for Mozart in Vienna after fleeing Venice for becoming involved in various scandals and was supported in exile for a while by nobles in the part of Italy then under Austrian control, which is now the border area between Italy and Slovenia.
The Piccolo Opera Festival (21 June to 7 September) inhabits this region, which includes Gorizia and Nova Gorica, the cross border city that was European Capital of Culture last year, as well as Trieste. The centrepieces are L'Ape Musicale, a pastiche opera with words by da Ponte and music by some of the many composers he worked with, and Luigi Dallapiccola's Il Prigioniero, marking 50 years since Dallapiccola died. In the same programme as that there is the world premiere production of Mauricio Agostini's Il Sigillio.
While Piccolo Opera's 2026 season has the subtitle Freedom, the Cistermúsica – Alcobaça Music Festival (26 June to 31 July) over in the centre of Portugal concentrates on Resurrection. Its many concerts take place in the city's immense Gothic monastery. There have been no monks there since 1834 but it is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The festival's music ranges from the 13th century, when the building was finished, to now with Mozart, Mahler, Dvorak and Stravinsky in between.
Ingolstadt, on the River Danube in Bavaria, has a rather different sort of monument: the Audi Mobile Museum, in the city where the car manufacturer has its headquarters – if you really like law and order, there is also the Bavarian Police Museum. Speed meets parking ticket! Audi has sponsored a month of summer concerts since 1990. In its museum The Barbican Quartet perform works by Thomas Ades and Sophia Jani on 18 July. On 27 June The Baltic Sea Philharmonic gives its utterly unconventional take on music inspired by swans. It includes Tchaikovsky's Rococo Variations played by 12 year-old cello soloist, Charlotte Melkonian. Also reimagined is Purcell's opera Dido and Aeneas (4 & 5 July), the 17th century music augmented by urban dance culture and 'beatboxing' in Inglostadt's ballroom.
There are very few member festivals in EFA that have been going for longer than the Varna Summer Festival (27 June to 14 October). This year the festival in Bulgaria's resort city on the Black Sea marks its centenary and it opens with a cantata by Milko Kolarov celebrating it. It is also the centenary of the Canadian jazz pianist Oscar Peterson and a trio led by Kristina Miller will mark it in Varna Opera House on 4 July. In the same venue on 25 July the festival's Artistic Director Mario Hossen leads his Paganini Ensemble Vienna in music by that composer and a commissioned premiere by Georgi Arnaudov. The Euoropean Union Youth Orchestra is there on 18 August, with Mario playing a Song for Violin and Orchestra by Pancho Vladigerov before Julia Hagan plays Dvorak's Cello Concerto. There is an awful lot more music before the BBC Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Sakari Oramo, rounds off the festivities with Elgar's magnificent First Symphony on 14 October.