MaerzMusik 2025 Thrills The Audience
This year's edition of MaerzMusik, curated by Kamila Metwaly, ended successfully on 30 March with the concert installation “I AM ALL EARS” at Haus der Berliner Festspiele. The 10-day festival with over 230 artists involved achieved a capacity utilisation of over 93% and attracted over 6,500 visitors. Almost all of the 27 events were sold out and many were celebrated with standing ovations.
The next edition of MaerzMusik will take place from 20 to 29 March 2026.
The 14th festival edition of MaerzMusik provided the Berliner Festspiele with a diverse festival programme ranging from solo performances and ensemble concerts with different casts to multimedia music theatre and projects with dance through to new participatory formats. The very sought-after festival closed with an occupancy rate of over 93%, with over 6,500 visitors attending the 27 events and the supporting programme with talks and workshops at the Haus der Berliner Festspiele, the Radialsystem, the Sophiensæle, the silent green, the daadgalerie and the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church.
The festival opened in cooperation with the Staatsoper Unter den Linden and the Ensemble Modern with two sold-out performances of the music theatre show “MELENCOLIA” by Brigitta Muntendorf and Moritz Lobeck. The 10-day programme was characterised by artistic explorations of the human breath, beginning with the performances for solo voice by icon Joan La Barbara and media artist and singer Pamela Z, which received standing ovations. Further approaches and highlights on this theme were the productions “Minor Characters” by Jennifer Walshe, “The Art of Camouflage” by Ute Wassermann, “The Urban Tale of a Hippo” with the Lithuanian ensemble Synaesthesis, “POETICA” by Chaya Czernowin with singer and percussionist Steven Schick and the moving solo performance by dancer Ligia Lewis in the evening “limina / Sensation 1” with Ensemble Nikel. Finally, the two festival days at silent green focussed on the “Global Breath” research project initiated by trumpeter Marco Blaauw and presented a whole series of world premieres and new works for brass instruments by Raven Chacon, Wadada Leo Smith, Liza Lim and many others. The programme at silent green was also complemented by two further solo voice performances that were acclaimed by the audience: baritone Ty Bouque and composer and performer Laura Bowler each opened up very different perspectives on breath and the voice as an instrument with new works.
The German premiere of “Drifting to the Rhythms at the Southeast of Nowhere” by the duo Nguyễn + Transitory with five female dancers – one of the festival's projects extended by dance – was a particular hit with the audience; likewise the precise and colourful playing of the 10 drum sets in Enno Poppe's “Streik” on the large stage of the Festspielhaus. Here, the festival came to its crowning conclusion on Sunday, 30 March, in a large-scale two-hour concert installation entitled “I AM ALL EARS”, co-curated by composer Wojtek Blecharz, with a total of 22 performers: the audience was able to explore artistic positions and sound events taking place simultaneously in the open stage house and the lower stage, which brought together many of the festival's thematic strands into a concluding whole.
The sound exhibition “Here On the Edge of the Sea We Sit” by Ting-Jung Chen, Fellow of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Programme, which opened in the daadgalerie as part of MaerzMusik, is open until 4 May 2025.
The concert in the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church “CHAN: Sonnets and Devotions in the Wilderness” by the Filipino-American composer, percussionist and sound artist Susie Ibarra was recorded by Deutschlandfunk Kultur and will be available in the BerlinerFestspiele Media Library after the radio broadcast. Also there, articles from the magazine published for the festival can be read.
Current press photos are available for download in the MaerzMusik press area.
Festival partners MaerzMusik 2025
Akademie der Künste Berlin, American Academy in Berlin, Auswärtiges Amt, DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program, Embassy of the Republic of Lithuania in Germany, Culture Ireland / Cultúr Éireann, Ernst von Siemens Musikstiftung, Goethe-Institut, IRCAM, kultkom – Kerstin Wiehe | QuerKlang gUG, Kunststiftung NRW, Lithuanian Culture Institute, MAIIAM Contemporary Art Museum, Staatsoper Unter den Linden