Gaudeamus Festival reaches its 80th edition in 2025 with an expansive programme of concerts, interdisciplinary works, and critical discussions. What began as a platform for contemporary composition has grown into an international hub for experimental sound and performance. This year’s festival features more than 45 events, ranging from chamber works to large-scale performances and electronic projects. Highlights include the Gaudeamus Award, which has introduced generations of composers to international recognition, alongside workshops and seminars that encourage dialogue across disciplines.

Central to the festival’s identity is its commitment to the new. By inviting young composers and musicians from across the world, Gaudeamus creates an environment where invention and risk are not only encouraged but expected. Utrecht becomes the canvas for this exchange, with venues across the city filled by sound, ideas, and collaboration. Eighty years of history provide depth, yet the festival looks firmly forward, shaping how contemporary music is imagined and heard today.

Laura Agnusdei

The exhibition of Laura Agnusdei at Gaudeamus Festival 2025 reflects her ongoing search for ways to extend musical language into spatial and collective forms. A composer and saxophonist trained in both acoustic and electronic practice, Agnusdei has developed a distinctive voice where breath, signal, and environment converge.

Her presentation transforms the exhibition space into a resonant chamber, where sound is encountered not only as melody or structure but as atmosphere, vibration, and memory. Live instruments intersect with electronic processing, producing layers that move between clarity and abstraction. Visitors are invited to navigate these shifting textures, allowing listening to become a form of participation.

Zeno Van Den Broek

At Gaudeamus Festival 2025, Zeno van den Broek constructed a performance that treated sound as a spatial phenomenon rather than a linear score. Low frequencies vibrated through the room, altering balance and perception, while high-pitched tones cut with scalpel-like clarity. The performance unfolded like an investigation into the architecture of listening itself, demanding physical and intellectual attention from the audience. Each pulse, frequency, and silence became an element in a fragile structure built within the body as much as the venue. What remained was not a narrative but an exacting study of sound as presence.

Eli Keszler

Eli Keszler approaches the drum set as an instrument of architecture rather than rhythm. His performance transforms sticks, skins, and cymbals into a network of collisions, frictions, and resonances. Patterns erupt and dissolve with mechanical precision, yet the result feels volatile, closer to sculpture in motion than conventional percussion. Keszler does not treat time as a grid but as a fragile surface, constantly fractured and rebuilt. Each gesture redraws the relationship between sound, space, and silence, leaving the listener suspended between pulse and texture, between structure and chaos, in a performance that demands attention at every instant.

Smash Duo

With Smash Duo, theatre and sound become as one. Their performance begins in a world of human noises and shifting lights, playful in tone, at times ironic, always captivating in its understated humour. The duo disarms the audience with simplicity, letting everyday sounds become the pulse of the stage. This opening gives way to percussion, executed with clarity and strength, drawing the audience into a more physical dimension of sound. The contrast is sharp but intentional, turning the performance into a dialogue between fragility and force, irony and seriousness. Smash Duo brings both laughter and intensity into a single arc.

Anushka Chkheidze

Anushka Chkheidze builds performances that feel like entire environments. Her ambient sound unfolds patiently, with tones that stretch across the space like currents of light. The show is not about spectacle but about immersion, a careful shaping of atmosphere where sound and illumination merge into one calm, enveloping presence. The stage becomes less a stage and more a field of resonance, where light guides perception and music suspends time.

Kanyva Van Grangelen - Perforator

Kanyva Van Grangelen opens Perforator with disarming honesty. She speaks directly, recounting fragments of her own past with a clarity that feels both intimate and theatrical. This first part is narrative and raw, pulling the audience into her world before any sound is made. Then the shift arrives: a performance that layers music with fabrics stretched across a three-piece structure in the background. The textiles become more than stage design; they interact with the sound, reflecting the weight of her words in physical form. Perforator is confession, composition, and constructed space held together by her singular presence.

Gaudeamus Festival

@gaudeamusnl⁠⁠

Words by Donald Gjoka

@donaldgjoka⁠⁠