CHAMBER MUSIC FESTIVAL 2026

Throughout the centuries, art music has been realized as an unending struggle between tension and relaxation, between dissonance and consonance, between the spiritual and the material. Musical beauty is never one-dimensional; rather, it is understood as the achievement of balance between opposing forces.

This balance is attained in the most natural and effortless way in Mozart’s music, and the five distinguished musicians performing his Quintet undoubtedly possess all the qualities required to do justice to this perfection of equilibrium. At other times, however, such balance is achieved through more anxious means, through feverish expression and powerful conflict, as in the emotionally charged music of Dmitri Shostakovich or the nostalgically Romantic world of his compatriot Nikolai Medtner. A profound interpreter of both composers, the virtuoso Alexei Volodin returns to the Chamber Music Festival Chania for a second consecutive year.