EFA Monthly Digest September 2026
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.
Late summer theatre takes over Sarajevo with Sarajevo Fest for a week (30 August – 6 September). It is hard in this digest to give a sensible view of the seriousness or intensity (Electra, Brecht's Ghosts, Death In Dubrovnik – the latter a coproduction with Human Rights Action, Kotor in Montenegro) of the programme, directed by EFA legend Haris Pašović, who has been bringing thought provoking arts to the city through war and peace for many decades. One title sums up his ethos of asking us to engage properly with the instability and violence in Europe: Don't Get Used To It – Sarajevo – Kharkiv, an audiovisual performance for solo cello and electronics, throughout the city on 2 September. There are discussions, a youth forum and some awards presented during the week too.
Het Theater Festival (2 – 12 September) is mostly devoted to Flemish or Dutch language productions in various venues around the city that identify with that side of its culture. One early evening (4 September) has a debate on the arts “in the grip of the far right”. Since the programme on the website was written it is encouraging that two of the countries listed (Hungary and the Netherlands) no longer are but there are plenty of others – including Flanders – where the balance is precarious and an election or two could tip it. Rather more optimistically, audiences can go on four nights to watch Collectif Malunés perform Ki no nagare, “or Flowing Energy; a contemporary circus performance in which hand-to-hand techniques merge with circular movements inspired by aikido, literally the way of harmony”.
Wratislavia Cantans' title is a little confusing to those outside Silesia. It takes place (3 – 13 September) in Wroclaw, Poland, not Bratislava, Slovakia, and does not only include vocal music, as the term Cantans implies. The main venue is the relatively new complex of the National Forum for Music, though there are concerts in other places around the city. Following on from my reference to Early Music above, a veteran of the genre, Paul McCreesh, who has long links with the city, brings his Gabrieli Consort and Players to its main cathedral to reconstruct the 1595 mass for the coronation of the Doge in Venice (5 September).
Sometimes a music festival really hits my spot in terms of its attractiveness. MITO SettembreMusica (6 – 20 September) happens - as its acronym suggests, standing for MilanoTorino - half in theatres and churches in Milan, half in Turin. Many (though not all) of the concerts are given in both. The diligent critic could have fun deciding which city gets the better performance. This year they are marking the 50th anniversary of the death of Benjamin Britten with his War Requiem, composed to mark the rising of Coventry Cathedral from its WWII ashes and signifying the hope that the Cold War was thawing. In these days of war that Requiem is an important reminder of history's ghastly repeats. There's also Les Arts Florissants in a danced and sung presentation of Charpentier's Orphée, an imaginative list of orchestral and chamber concerts including a complete cycle of Beethoven's string quartets and, in more relaxed vein, sessions devoted to Piazzola (the king of the tango) and Enrico Morricone - that stalwart composer for the 'spaghetti westerns' (as Sergio Leone's films with Clint Eastwood were labelled unkindly). Morricone, by the way, also wrote a theme tune for EFA!
Somehow it is impossible to separate Plovdiv, one of the world's most ancient cities in continuous occupation, from the myth of Orpheus, whose home it was reputed to be. Sure enough, this year's Plovdiv Drama Theatre's Crossroads Stage Autumn Theatre Festival (10 – 21 September) does not. It includes Jean Anouilh's 20th century take on the story, Eurydice. There are also productions of Brecht's Caucasian Chalk Circle and Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream slotted in among more contemporary presentations. The festival describes itself as a scene “at a crossroads: a score, an aria, an echo of illusions for 30 years”.
Talk of Orpheus brings us to the month's serious music festivals. Flanders Festival Ghent iteration (10 – 27 September) this year includes two modern classics of the minimalism movement: Philip Glass' Einstein On The Beach (Ghent Schouwburg 16 September) and Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians, the second starting at 10pm (26 September in Club Wintercircus) and slipping into the early hours of the next day. In the MIRY concert hall there are concerts of Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time (24 September) and the next evening, Stravinsky's The Soldier's Tale. Ghent is one of Europe's great centres for Early Music (in other words classical music from before the era of the big symphony orchestras) and this year's festival has the A Nocte Temporis ensemble giving Alcide, which was a collaboration between two of France's major Baroque composers, Marin Marais and Lully (De Biljoke 19 September).
Europe has many fine theatres dating from ancient times but one of the best preserved is the Roman era one, built in 155 AD, at the site of Aspendos, a little to the east of Antalya in Anatolia. For over thirty years an autumn festival of opera and ballet has been staged in it. This year (12 – 26 September) it has productions of Verdi's opera Attila and dance stagings of Anna Karennina, Carmina Burana (Carl Orff's arranging of songs by naughty mediaeval monks) and Khachaturian's superb telling of slaves rising against their overlords, Spartacus. Amazingly the theatre is relatively recent in Anatolian terms. In the last few years archaeologists have discovered cities and monuments for celebratory gatherings there in remarkably good condition dating back 12500 years, to the early Neolithic period when it was thought humans were just wandering nomads chasing wild gazelle and boars. Not so. We've had the arts longer than we think.
GogolFest has been an itinerant festival around Ukraine for much of its twenty years, sometimes with massive community and city installations that now seem very poignant. One of its first engagements with EFA was when it was staging a huge 'ballet' with ships and harbour cranes in the port of Mariupol on the Sea of Azov – a city now all but destroyed by the Russian occupiers. This year GogolFest is back in Kyiv, at the city's International Centre for Culture and the Arts (16 – 20 September). GogolFest envisions itself “as an ark; a space where different cultures and voices coexist without losing their own sound - not a museum or a repository but a living network in which culture takes root, not simply survives.” At the same time the festival hopes to be an antidote to simplistic narratives and includes a conference on Ukrainian identity.
The Baltic island of Usedom had a turbulent 20th century, pulled and pushed between Nazism and Communism. Now everything is back to its sedate and pleasant status as a polite resort for those not seeking southern hotspots. Its festival hosted the EFA Summit a few years ago and this year's programme (19 September – 10 October) has big orchestral concerts in the former rocket weapons factory at Peenemunde and chamber concerts around the island. It also hosts the cellist David Geringas' masterclass forum. I saw a version of this at last year's Enescu Festival in Bucharest and his work with the young musicians is truly impressive.
So as not to confuse it with Wratislavia I mentioned Bratislava earlier in this digest. Its festival (23 September – 11 October) happens when autumn is well advanced and most halls have their local seasons starting. Nonetheless Bratislava has the Cleveland, St. Cecilia Rome and Czech Philharmonic Orchestras visiting. Rome's orchestra gives a particularly sumptuous programme on 2 October of Rachmaninov's Second Symphony and Third Piano Concerto (with Nicholai Lugansky as soloist). The festival begins and ends with a Mahler symphony played by the Slovak Philharmonic: His first to begin (naturally), The Titan, and the second to finish – again appropriate since this grandest of all symphonies is titled The Resurrection. Nicole Young and Yatuka Sado will guide them as conductors