 |
| Historic Baku Opera Theatre |
The second Baku International Arts Festival (BIAF) will take place in Baku, Azerbaijan, from 28 October to 8 November 2026 with more than 20 events spanning dance, drama, music, and film, bringing together performers from Azerbaijan, the UK, Israel, Canada, Monaco, Russia, the USA, France, and other nations. This year’s programme places special emphasis on collaboration between internationally renowned artists and Azerbaijani performers and institutions.
Baku is the largest city on the Caspian Sea and in the Caucasus region, and is the lowest lying national capital in the world. It sits on the Absheron peninsula, at the narrowest point of the corridor between the Caspian and the Caucasus range — the pinch through which caravans, armies, ideas and, latterly, pipelines have had to pass. The walled Old City, Icherisheher, still contains the caravanserais where merchants stabled their animals; the Shirvanshahs’ Palace and the Maiden Tower stand within a few minutes’ walk of one another, and of the Zoroastrian fire that gave the country its name. The roads out of these gates ran to Multan and Bukhara, to Tabriz, Baghdad and Damascus, to Istanbul and on to Venice — and medieval Baku was a centre of Sufi learning on that network, a station of the Khalwati order whose scholar Seyid Yahya Bakuvi lies buried inside the palace grounds, a few steps from the shahs’ own.
 |
| Baku-Icherisheher (the Old City) |
The oil boom of the 1870s turned a fortress town into one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the Russian Empire — by 1900 Baku was producing roughly half the world’s oil, and its wealth built mansions in every European style along the seafront. The opera house came out of the same money and a better story: the Mailov brothers, caviar magnates with fisheries on the Kura, put it up in under a year after a visiting soprano — the name attached to the story is always Antonina Nezhdanova — remarked that she could hardly return to a city with no proper opera house. It opened in February 1911 with Boris Godunov.
BIAF opens on 28 October at the Philharmonic Hall with a concert marking the 120th anniversary of Dmitri Shostakovich, whose life and legacy remain closely tied to Azerbaijan and directly shaped its national school of composition. His Concerto No. 1 for Piano, Trumpet and Orchestra, premiered on this same stage by the composer in 1934, will be performed by Russian-Lithuanian pianist Lukas Geniušas and Norwegian trumpeter Tine Thing Helseth, with the Baku State Chamber Orchestra and the BIAF Festival Orchestra under Baku-born violinist and conductor Dmitry Sitkovetsky.
South African artist William Kentridge’s multimedia work Oh To Believe in Another World brings a live visual interpretation to Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 10, a work whose musical themes encode the composer’s secret declaration of affection for his Baku student, pianist and composer Elmira Nazirova. Sitkovetsky conducts the Festival Orchestra, and the programme continues with Fikret Amirov and Nazirova’s Concerto for Piano and Orchestra on Arabian Themes, performed by Farhad Badalbeyli, Rector of the Baku Music Academy and a personal acquaintance of both composers.
The Heydar Aliyev Center hosts violinist David Garrett, the Juilliard-trained “Paganini of pop,” presenting his Baku premiere of Millennium Symphony, a symphonic reimagining of the past 25 years’ biggest hits. The festival closes on 8 November at the Philharmonic with two-time Grammy winner Maxim Vengerov, one of the world’s most sought-after violinists.
The theatre programme includes Lev Dodin’s acclaimed staging of Chekhov’s The Seagull from the Maly Drama Theatre; Dmitry Krymov’s Bloody Mary, a free, image-driven response to Schiller’s Mary Stuart; and the Rezo Gabriadze Marionette Theatre’s Alfred and Violetta, a reworking of La Dame aux Camélias relocated to 1990s Tbilisi, completed by director Leo Gabriadze after his father’s death in 2021.
The dance programme includes Thikra: Night of Remembering at the National Drama Theatre, choreographed by Akram Khan, and New Earth and Bolero from choreographer Shahar Binyamini and as part of the festival’s mentorship strand, Binyamini is also training and integrating dancers from the Azerbaijan State Academic Opera and Ballet Theatre and the Baku Choreography Academy into the production.
English National Ballet makes its Baku debut with Masters in Motion: Forsythe/Pite, pairing Crystal Pite’s Body and Soul (Part 1) with William Forsythe’s Playlist (EP).
The full BIAF 2026 programme and tickets are available at festival web site
