InClassica International Music Festival 2025
The InClassica International Music Festival has by now become a staple of the UAE’s annual cultural calendar, with the festival setting new standards for classical music entertainment ever since coming to the Middle East to celebrate its 10th anniversary edition back in 2020. Since then, its reach and appeal has only grown higher and higher, with organisers working to ensure that new attendees and returning ones alike will continue to experience the world class talent and high production values that InClassica has become synonymous with.
Its 14th edition, which was held in Dubai between the 6th to the 21st of April 2025, has proven to be no different. Honouring the 55th birthday of acclaimed contemporary composer Alexey Shor, this latest iteration was hosted at Dubai Opera, one of the city’s most spectacular venues, and welcomed dozens of internationally-acclaimed artists from all around the world to the UAE, presenting a groundbreaking two-week spectacle of musical excellence, with a total of 16 concerts, featuring the Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra and Franz Schubert Filharmonia (Spain), as well as an astonishing 13 award-winning soloists and 5 distinguished conductors.
Audiences that flocked to the event were treated to an exciting mixture of performances, including orchestral concerts, as well as a series of solo and duo recitals. Among the festival’s highlights were an opening concert headlined by the inimitable violinist Roman Kim (Germany) on April 6th; a performance with the illustrious violinist Maxim Vengerov (Monaco) on April 10th, two concerts with the globally-acclaimed violinist Gil Shaham (USA) on the 14th and 16th of the month, and no fewer than four separate events with the living legend that is Mikhail Pletnev (Switzerland), who appeared as a solo pianist alongside conductor Andrea Battistoni (Italy) and the Tokyo Philharmonic on April 9th, before taking on the role of conductor himself at the head of the Franz Schubert Filharmonia on April 12th, delivering a solo recital on April 19th, and then winding up the festival with a spectacular duo recital alongside famed violinist Daniel Lozakovich (Sweden) on April 21st!
Other celebrated names on the roster included violinists Giuseppe Gibboni (Italy), Daniel Hope (Ireland) and Fumiaki Miura (Japan); pianists Behzod Abduraimov (Uzbekistan), and Denis Kozhukhin (Belgium); violist David Aaron Carpenter (USA); French cellists Edgar Moreau and Gautier Capuçon; clarinettist Fabrizio Meloni (Italy), and conductors John Warner (UK), Lionel Bringuier (France), and Tomàs Grau (Spain), among many others.
Over the course of the festival, a record-breaking number of people arrived from all over the world to pack the halls for each concert, eagerly relishing this rare opportunity to experience the talents of these maestros as they interpreted works from a myriad of household names within the world of composition, ranging all the way from the Baroque up to the contemporary. Over all, the festival’s programme included pieces from the minds of Ludwig van Beethoven, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Igor Stravinsky, Giuseppe Verdi, Franz Schubert, and Antonín Dvořák, among many others, as well as various contemporary offerings from Alexey Shor himself, who took on the role of the festival’s Composer-in-Residence.
