Gala. Five Years of Music

Date:: 7 Sep–16 Dec 2026

Age:

Type:

Place:: Playhouse , Prospekt

Age restrictions: 12+

Made at GES-2: five years of music at the House of Culture in seven concerts.

GES-2 House of Culture will celebrate its fifth anniversary in December 2026. This is an opportunity to look back at the road travelled, to remember what we did and how we did it, what we thought about, and what we listened to. The Gala. Five Years of Music curatorial series takes stock of the first five years of the GES-2 music programme and explores how it found its own voice, connecting historical and social dimensions through the rabbit holes of art, bridging eras, and resonating with our own time.

Programme 

Landmark musical projects that were presented at the House of Culture from 2022 and 2026 return to the Playhouse and Prospekt in performances by musicians who are well known to GES-2 audiences—conductors Ekaterina Antonenko, Fedor Lednev and Philipp Chizhevsky, pianist Yury Favorin, the Boulez Ensemble, the Intrada Vocal Ensemble, and the Pratum Integrum Orchestra. Not everyone who wished to attend the original performances was able to do so: all of them drew a full house when they first came to GES-2. The Gala. Five Years of Music series cannot offer exact replicas of the earlier performances. Artistic and auditory experience exists in the here and now—it cannot be reproduced. The concert programmes, with works by composers from Heinrich Ignaz Franz von Biber and Claude Debussy to Anton Bruckner and Johannes Kreidler, remain unchanged, but the performers and the context of the times, whose acoustics shape our perception, are different.

The title of the series recalls the original meaning of the word “gala”, which describes an event that is somehow special and festive, but also denotes a theatrical genre in which the narrative is constructed from fragments of different works. Curated programmes of previous years, from Refitting Old Ships to Collective Actions, explored the mutual attraction and repulsion between old and new art, playing with the perspectives of musical traditions and discovering points where eras and styles intersect, at the same time as they engage in dialogue with one another to establish an open system of connections. Gala. Five Years of Music brings these elements together to form a completely new mosaic, while summarising the key themes and narratives of the House of Culture’s concert programme from its beginnings and up to the present.