Previous editions
20th Music Gardens Festival
The Beautiful Twenty-Year-Old
October 5 – 27, 2020
19th Music Gardens Festival
With the flow of the Loire
June 30 – July 28, 2019
18th Music Gardens Festival
It’s only 100 years old
June 30 – July 31, 2018
17th Music Gardens Festival
Estonia country of creative people
July 1 – 26, 2017
16th Music Gardens Festival
On both sides of the mountains
July 15 – August 9, 2016
Grand Courtyard of the Royal Castle in Warsaw – Museum
Slovakia was the guest of honor at the 16th Festival.
History of the festival
In 2001, Ryszard Kubiak, a cultural manager and director, Zygmunt Krauze, a composer and pianist, and Barbara Pietkiewicz-Kraśko, a television producer and ballet promoter, created and organized the 1st Music Gardens Festival.
Since the beginning, the festival has been held every year in July, lasting about a month, offering audiences more than 30 different events. These include screenings of filmed, outstanding opera productions and ballet performances, films about the arts and live concerts.
All festival events are held in an air-conditioned tent set up in the courtyard of the Royal Castle in Warsaw. It can accommodate about a thousand spectators.
Twentieth-century and contemporary music concerts were presented as part of the “Passage” series, Over time, the inaugural and final concerts, as well as special concerts, became a festival tradition.
Among the performers were. NOSPR, Sinfonia Varsovia, Sinfonia Iuventus, the Big Band of the University of Music, Giovanni Sollima with the orchestra Popolare la Notte della Taranta and a troupe of dancers, the Chamber Orchestra of the City of Tychy Aukso, the Prima Vista Quartet, Stockholm Saxophone Quartet, Kwadrofonik, Motion Trio, The Swingle Singers, Estonian Piano Orchestra, Vox Clamantis, Grace Bumbry, Isabel Karajan, Raquel Camarinha, Urszula Kryger, Iwona Sobotka, Agata Zubel, Maciej Grzybowski, Mariusz Patyra.
The breakthrough was the sixth “Vienna in the Music Gardens” festival, realized in the Mozart Year (2006) in cooperation with Wiener Mozart Jahr and EuroArts.
Since 2008, the guest of honor of the festival has been the country assuming the presidency of the Council of the European Union on July 1. This is reflected in the program, which presents the country’s art. There have already been successively French “Gardens”, Scandinavian with an accent on Swedish, Belgian (with a split between Flanders and Walloon), Polish, Mediterranean with an accent on Cyprus, Lithuanian, Italian, Luxembourgish, Slovakian, Estonian.
The 18th “Gardens” will host three countries: Austria, which assumes the presidency on July 1, 2018, Bulgaria, which held the presidency in the first half of 2018, and Estonia, which is celebrating its 100th anniversary of independence this year.
A separate strand of the festival is the Children’s Music Gardens, which are educational in nature.
The festival is financed by funds from the City of Warsaw and the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage.
