This month, the Linos Piano Trio welcome curious listeners to their annual festival in Cologne, in which they present world-class chamber music in immersive, interdisciplinary formats, and challenge boundaries between performers and audience.

Each year, the Linos Festival presents familiar repertoire and outstanding guest artists in a new light, casting them through the lens of interdisciplinary perspectives, creative performance formats and experimental impulses. Performances are both intense and approachable, with a 2024 festival event being praised as “an extraordinary evening where you could listen with an open mind” by journalist Sabine Weber.

For 2025, the Linos Piano Trio bring together early, experimental and Thai classical music, as well as beatboxing, under the theme Confluence (Zusammenfluss).

The festival opens on Friday 26th September with a programme in which the Linos Festival Baroque Ensemble and beatboxer and recorder player Johann Sundermeier explore the ciaccona as a vehicle for changing musical forms of expression over the centuries. The following day, guest artists Sarah Saviet (contemporary violin and electronics) and Liam Byrne (viola da gamba) present a site-specific concert at the Sancta Clara Keller, the result of their residency at the festival.

This year, the Trio are proud to launch the Linos Festival Academy, an initiative that sees an emerging ensemble co-curate, alongside the artistic directors, a project that embraces the festival’s revolutionary spirit. The Belgian ensemble Trio Susato have been selected as the inaugural ensemble in this scheme, and will give their performance on Saturday 27th September.

On 28th September, the Trio are joined by percussionist Ramón Gardella to perform Aurea Terra Suite for piano trio and Southeast Asian percussion by the Trio’s pianist Prach Boondiskulchok. The programme also includes a new piano trio by Miles Walter, written as part of the Trio’s initiative of commissioning a composer each year who has not previously written for the genre, Beethoven’s Piano Trio no. 5 in E flat major, op. 70 no. 2 and the Trio’s arrangement of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite.

Young listeners and their families are invited to two family concerts as part of the festival, in which Hoffmann’s story Nutcracker and the Mouse King appears next to Tchaikovsky’s music, and where the children will have an opportunitiy to participate.

Full details of each event in the festival and more information may be found by visiting the festival’s website.