Guest Director of Brighton Festival 2025, composer and sitarist Anoushka Shankar has announced an eclectic and multifaceted lineup for this years festival, covering classical and contemporary music, theatre, visual arts, dance, literature and more.
Shankar will give a special performance of her forthcoming album, Chapter III: We Return to Light. This performance is a culmination of her recent trilogy of mini-albums, completing the cycle and looking towards a new dawn - a time of strength, wisdom and change.
On the classical music side, Shankar herself will perform, for the first time since the BBC Proms in 2017, her father Ravi Shankar and American composer Philip Glass’s pioneering album Passages, alongside an ensemble of Indian classical musicians and the Britten Sinfonia.
Further, The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and Brighton Festival Chorus perform the UK premiere of Academy Award-winning film composer Rachel Portman’s new concerto, Tipping Points, as part of their nature-themed programme featuring Sibelius’s orchestral hymn to the Finnish forests, Tapiola Op. 112 and American eco-activist composer John Luther Adams’s Vespers of the Blessed Earth.
For Brighton Festival 2025, we look towards a New Dawn. Together with the Brighton Festival team, I’ve been shaping a programme that envisions a hopeful future – an emergence from the dark of night into the glow of early morning. For years now there have been many reasons to worry, to lose hope. But we have the power within us to create an alternate future. That’s what Brighton Festival 2025 is about – let's come together to reflect, lift each other up and take action. This is a festival for everyone to participate in, to connect with, to feel part of. I can’t wait.
– Anoushka Shankar, Guest Director Brighton Festival 2025
Find out more and explore the rest of the line-up here.
Shankar's new album will be released in March, but you can stream the first single Hiraeth now.
