SoNoRo Festival 20

Bucharest – Cluj
31.10 – 16.11.2025

„Where words fail, music speaks.”

Hans Christian Andersen

SoNoRo Festival 2025, 20th edition

The SoNoRo Festival, now in its 20th edition, is a state of mind and a way of life. “Romanian Rhapsody” – the theme of this anniversary edition – is about our audience and all the people who have contributed to building this dream dedicated to chamber music in Romania. The music of these years resounds in our inner salon, and we watch – as if in a cinema – the images that appear on the screen of our emotional memory, with hundreds of concerts and thousands of people we have met.

What does 20 years mean? It means that we planted the seeds of a dream and continued to nurture it year after year, with vision and perseverance and with renewed excitement at each edition. “Romanian Rhapsody” encompasses all our experiences to date, in an alchemical formula, which we will continue to offer to the public on our 20th anniversary.

Over time, the SoNoRo Festival has also included other arts, infusing its musical programmes with perspectives from architecture, film, photography, literature, psychology, dance and theatre, thus stimulating the listener’s creativity. Themes such as Un ballo in maschera, New Worlds, Love Unlimited, Up!, Bridges, The Dreamers, La muse et le poète, Hide & Seek, Side Effects, DaDa, Pasărea măiastră, Dreamtigers, Orient Express, On the Couch and Ex libris have brought different perspectives and a lot of playful expression to the Romanian chamber music scene, changing the traditional way of perceiving the message of classical music.

Over time, the SoNoRo Festival has become a major chamber music salon, welcoming audiences, sponsors, partners and many friends for the past 20 years.

Let us enjoy this anniversary edition!

Răzvan Popovici, Executive Director

How can you sum up 20 years in a few lines? Perhaps with a little perspective, a lot of patience and infinite joy, just as we built the SoNoRo Festival – an innovative project dedicated to chamber music in Romania. When did 20 years go by? While we tenaciously built the architecture of our festival, year after year, while inviting hundreds of artists from the national and international scene, while raising new generations of musicians, presenting works performed for the first time in our country, involving the right people in the SoNoRo team and creating lasting relationships with our sponsors and partners. For these reasons, and many others, the current edition is called “Romanian Rhapsody” – an essence of all that is best in the Romanian spirit and soul, but also a tribute to all the people who have believed in us over time.

We invite you on a journey of 20 concerts, in Bucharest and Cluj-Napoca, where we will be accompanied by Constantin Brâncuși, Nichita Stănescu and the Dadaists, inspired by the Danube Delta, Muntenia, the Szeklerland and Moldova, by lullabies and Romanian composers such as George Enescu, Ciprian Porumbescu, Mihail Jora, Dinu Lipatti, Dan Dediu, Anatol Vieru and Stan Golestan, together with the great international names of chamber music.

In such controversial times, the SoNoRo Festival is an anchor. We look forward to seeing you in the concert halls to celebrate 20 vibrant years filled with the beauty that sometimes only music can bring into our lives!

 

Diana Ketler, Artistic Director

When we started to search for a theme for our anniversary 20th SoNoRo edition we wanted it to reflect our gratitude to the country which made it possible for us to realise our musical ideas. We also wanted to celebrate the extraordinary richness of Romanian musical landscape through the SoNoRo lens. Rhapsodie Roumaine reflects the unique voice of this land of artists, composers, performers, dreamers. Dreaming, after all, is the essential quality of the Romanian musical language, according to George Enescu. Dreaming, and a tendency to melancholy, but also the explosive energy radiating from the amalgam of many cultural dialects and peoples.

Romanian musical life was and remains open to influences of other cultures. In response it enriched the world and gave it some of the most miraculous works of art, music and literature and some of the greatest performing artists.

Rhapsodie Roumaine is a celebration of spirit, tales, rivers, rhythms, humour, strength, inventiveness, creativity, but most importantly it is a celebration of our love for the country which welcomes SoNoRo every year and makes us all feel a little bit more Romanian every time we return here to make music together.

Welcome and let’s celebrate together!