Online ticket sales for Biennale Musica open on 6 August

Starting today, Thursday 6 August 6 (at 3 pm), online ticket sales open for Biennale Musica. Tickets and subscriptions may be purchased in advance for the events in the programme from 10 to 24 October, exclusively on the website of La Biennale di Venezia at https://www.labiennale.org/en/music/2026/information#tickets.

The various offers available for subscriptions and concessions for younger concert-goers include:

• · a subscription for three concerts for the price of 60 euro (instead of 75).
• · a subscription for students and under 26 for three concerts at the special price of 36 euro (instead of 48).
• · the combined ticket Biennale Musica + Biennale Arte, which includes the choice of one concert among those in the programme of the 70th International Festival of Contemporary Music and one admission to the 61st International Art Exhibition for a total price of 40 euro (instead of 55).

Drawing inspiration from A Child of Sound, the child’s virgin listening, free of stylistic expectations or cultural conventions, and by childhood, therefore, as the original place of radical listening, Biennale Musica 2026, to be held in Venice from 10 to 24 October, presents a programme that travels across the centuries and the continents, mingling tradition, classical and experimental, continuing in the direction pursued last year by the director Caterina Barbieri.

Thus the Parco della Musica Contemporanea Ensemble brings together Musica per una fine by Ennio Morricone with Johann Sebastian Bach and Sarah Davachi, the festival’s Silver Lion. While In the Threshold of Your Love sets up a dialogue between the American composer and prodigious vocalist Alif Hilal, formerly known as Lyra Pramuk, and the Iranian musician Mohammad Reza Mortazevi, one of the leading performers of traditional Persian percussion. The power of the a cappella singing by the Tallis Scholars will lead audiences under the vaults of Saint Mark’s Basilica on a musical journey across the centuries, in the name of a shared aspiration to song as a privileged path of spiritual elevation. From Hildegard von Bingen and Gregorio Allegri to Arvo Pärt and Kara Lis Coverdale. And through the voice again, Clarissa Connelly, in Canons for a cappella choir, focuses on the complex relationship between historical memory and the contemporary world, creating a dreamlike synthesis between Nordic folk songs, Medieval song and digital sound.

Exile, memory, roots, ancient knowledge and the contemporary merge in the works of many artists. Such as Asmaâ Hamzaoui, the first woman to interpret the ancient sacred tradition of gnawa music, practiced by the descendants of the black Sub-Saharan slaves and traditionally the prerogative of men, who will be in Venice with her group Bnat Timbouktou. Alongside the musical tradition passed down through the centuries, is the effervescence of the hyper-contemporary Singeli music scene, which sprang ten years ago from the ghettos of Dar el Salam and the coastal area of Tanzania. Venice will host the protagonists of this scene for a unique event: Hamadi Hassani, alias Dj Travella, Pili Pili and Jay Mitta. Nídia, Dj Firmeza and Helviofox bring an original mix of electronic music and the Afro-diasporic influences of kuduro, gatida and gqom – the expression of the community of descendants of the former Portuguese colonies in Africa who have found ideal fertile ground in the barrios of Lisbon and its melting pot.

In the space between popular and cultured music lies Walter Zanetti’s experimentation, who comes to Biennale Musica with Cantos Yoruba de Cuba, a remarkable exploration of Afro-Cuban sacred music translated through the timbral intimacy of classical guitar, and El Decameron Negro, the work of the most important Cuban composer, conductor and himself a consummate guitarist, Leo Brouwer, now 87 years old, who dissolves the ritual dances and songs of his Afro-Cuban roots into new melodies with avant-garde experimentation.

A most popular of instruments, which cuts across the long tradition of cultured music to become the protagonist of so many musical revolutions of the twentieth century, the guitar will be the focus of a special Biennale Musica event in the Pineta, the pine grove of Sant’Elena, with the ensemble Zwerm, expanded to eight elements to perform music commissioned by La Biennale to ML Buch and Gigi Masin.

Among the electronic and ambient experimentations of the late 1970s and 1980s that defined an original direction for the genre, are Gigi Masin’s cult album Wind and Prati Bagnati del Monte Analogo by Francesco Messina and Raul Lovisoni, produced by Cramps Records, a seedbed of the avant-garde. Biennale Musica will also feature two new voices in Italian synthetic minimalism, Marta de Pascalis with the world premiere of Stoma and Grand River with the first live performance of Temporary, her new album for guitar and electronics. Whereas the Orchestre de Nouvelles Créations Experimentations e Improvisations Musicales will be at the Biennale with for orchestra by Ellen Arkbro, a piece at the intersection between traditional acoustic music and electronic expansion, written music and improvisation, and Non puoi contare l’infinito for grand ensemble, three voices, electronics, commissioned by the Philarmonie de Paris to Caterina Barbieri. And also: Joy Guidry’s Five Prayers in Five Movements for bassoon, voice and electronics, which marks this astonishing artist’s shift from free jazz to a more meditative style closer to ambient music.

Alongside these new voices are pioneering musicians who have become figures of reference, such as the eighty-two-year-old American artist Laraaji, who will come to Biennale Music with one of her spectacular live performances and a workshop on meditative laughter. Another master, a pioneer of the Japanese noise scene and cult figure of radical improvisation is Keiji Haino, the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement. For Biennale Musica, Haino will perform one of his very special concerts for voice and string instruments.

Working at the intersection between live performance and experimental dj sets are the multidisciplinary artists featured at the festival: Polygonia, Dj Nobu, Carrier, Loidis, Livwutang, Mechatok, 100_ve, DJ Anderson do Paraiso.

The multisensory performance, As Nature, conceived by the Kenyan musician KMRU, was developed together with the artists Nick Verstand and Mareike Bode: its sonic dimension interweaves with visual and olfactory stimuli, offering an experience that involves and suspends the senses in a continuum of subtle and richly resonant perceptions.

Wyldie Bracewell, Talullah Calderwood, Lara Dâmaso, Andrea La Pietra and alys(alys)alys are the young musicians, sound artists and performers from Biennale College who will take to the stage with their works, created specifically for the festival.

Many of the events in the programme will take place in the Sale d’Armi of the Arsenale, a space dedicated to deep listening, encounter and exchange, titled, following this year’s theme, Origine. The programme will feature live concerts, listening sessions, screenings and encounters with the participation of Masaru Hatanaka from the legendary Nightingale listening bar in Tokyo, who will curate the musical and visual selections.