by InTrieste
After a summer preview of concerts, the International Festival of Sacred Music will return to northeastern Italy this fall for its 34th edition. Running from October 17 to November 16, 2025, the festival will feature eight international concerts in Pordenone and Udine, along with four lecture-performances and three conferences.
Organized by Presenza e Cultura in collaboration with the Centro Iniziative Culturali Pordenone, the festival is under the artistic direction of Franco Calabretto and Eddi De Nadai. This year’s theme is faith, the third and final chapter in a three-year cycle titled Caritas et Amor, which has explored spiritual traditions through music across centuries.
One of the most notable developments of the 2025 edition is a new partnership with the Teatro Lirico Giuseppe Verdi of Trieste. The collaboration will open with the production O Magnum Mysterium, performed by the brass ensemble of the Verdi Orchestra.
The program was presented on Tuesday, September 30, at the Teatro Verdi in Trieste by the artistic directors alongside Paolo Rodda, artistic manager of the Verdi Foundation. Concerts will take place primarily in the Co-Cathedral of San Marco in Pordenone and the Duomo of Udine, in collaboration with the Udine Organ Festival.
The festival will open on October 19 in Pordenone with Giullari di Dio, a program dedicated to Saint Francis that includes the first reconstructed performance of the Cantico di Frate Sole, contextualized alongside laude from the 12th and 13th centuries. The project, overseen by musicologist Francesco Zimei, will be performed by Ensemble Micrologus, pioneers in the revival of medieval music.
Highlights of the festival include Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, written and first performed in a Nazi prisoner-of-war camp in 1941. The piece will be presented on October 23 by a quartet of young musicians, accompanied by a narration from musicologist Sandro Cappelletto.
On October 26, the Teatro Verdi brass ensemble will perform O Magnum Mysterium, a program of sacred works by composers ranging from Giovanni Gabrieli to Francis Poulenc and Morten Lauridsen. On November 2, the Friuli Venezia Giulia Youth Choir and the Filarmonici Friulani Youth Orchestra will perform Arvo Pärt’s Berliner Messe, alongside works by Ralph Vaughan Williams and a world premiere by Maria Beatrice Orlando, a young composer from the region.
Later in the season, the Chamber Orchestra of Pordenone will join the Friuli Venezia Giulia Choir under Jörg-Andreas Bötticher in a continuation of the festival’s Bach cantata project, and the French-Italian vocal ensemble Corou de Berra will present polyphonic traditions from the Alpine region. Two organ recitals in Udine, one by Leonardo Carrieri and another featuring works by Bach and Telemann, will round out the schedule.
The festival also includes four lecture-concerts featuring Ukrainian musicians Iryna Bobyreva and Iryna Lytvynenko, students at the Trieste Conservatory, who will present programs exploring Jewish prayer and sacred-inspired works by Bruch, Bloch, and Saint-Saëns.
The International Festival of Sacred Music is supported by Italy’s Ministry of Culture, the Friuli Venezia Giulia regional government, the City of Pordenone, and the Fondazione Friuli, along with numerous cultural associations and local institutions.
More information is available at musicapordenone.it.
