The resonant sounds of sacred music, from medieval chants to contemporary commissions, will once again fill Bogotá as the 14th edition of the International Sacred Music Festival (FIMSAC) opens on September 10. Over nearly a month, the Colombian capital will host 40 concerts, lectures, exhibitions, and workshops featuring more than 750 artists from 16 countries across 20 venues.
The festival, which runs until October 5, has chosen “La Gloria” as its central theme. In a year that coincides with the 2025 Jubilee declared by the Catholic Church, organizers believe the programe seeks to explore not only the spiritual dimensions of glory but also its cultural, historical, and artistic resonance.
For Marianna Piotrowska, the festival’s director, the event is a chance to look inward while reaching across borders. “Through this festival, we want music to elevate us and connect us with the divine, with the spiritual, with the meditative, with that inner letter we all carry within,” she said. “It is also about reflecting on where we want to go as people and as a society. That is why we present great works dedicated to glory by composers who show us, through music, what it means.”
The extensive concert listing reflects that ambition. Alongside Gregorian chants and Baroque masterpieces, audiences will encounter African-American spirituals, Sephardic accordion works, and contemporary compositions, including the world premiere of a new Gloria by Colombian composer Diego Vega, commissioned especially for the festival. It will be performed at Bogotá’s Iglesia de San Ignacio, a Jesuit temple dating back to the 17th century.
Each year, FIMSAC commissions a visual artist to create its official image. This year’s artist of honour, Sair García, has produced a work that is as symbolic as it is cinematic. His painting draws on the languid, sweeping cinematography of Theodoros Angelopoulos (1935–2012), the Greek filmmaker celebrated for his epic, contemplative narratives about history, memory, and exile.
García’s piece is inspired by The Travelling Players, Angelopoulos’s haunting 1975 masterpiece. In that film, a troupe of actors wander across Greece performing Golfo the Shepherdess, a pastoral drama, while the Second World War and the subsequent civil war transform their fates. Their story becomes entangled with betrayal, political violence, and shifting allegiances. García reimagines one of the film’s “still frames,” capturing the moment when performers confront a landscape scarred by conflict yet charged with the possibility of renewal.
“The representation of glory is very subtle, though profoundly symbolic,” García explained. “The characters confront a changing world, a new horizon that opens before them as a result of their struggle against a past that oppressed them. What emerges is what they sought so hard: glory.”
By referencing Angelopoulos, García links Colombia’s present moment to broader questions of history, memory, and resilience – reminding audiences that sacred music and art, like cinema, can guide humanity toward reckoning with both suffering and transcendence.
International headliners include the celebrated German countertenor Andreas Scholl, French musicologist and conductor Marcel Pérès, Polish accordionist Jaroslaw Bester, and ensembles such as Les Arts Florissants under William Christie and Spain’s Capella de Ministrers, led by Carles Magraner.
Organists Michaela Káčerková (Czech Republic) and Laura Carrasco (Mexico), as well as the National Choir of Cuba and Israeli clarinettist Itzhak Ventura, also join the line-up. Spanish conductor Thomas Grau will make his Bogotá debut.
But the festival also provides a stage for Colombian talent. The Baroque Ensemble of Bogotá, soprano Julia Martínez from the San Andrés archipelago, baritone Valeriano Lanchas, and the youth ensemble from the city’s Philharmonic Orchestra will share the bill. For many, the commission of Vega’s Gloria represents a statement: a contribution to Colombia’s contemporary sacred repertoire and a reminder that the tradition continues to evolve.
Much of the agenda unfolds in Bogotá’s churches and temples, many of which are designated Jubilee sites this year. The Catedral Primada, the Basílica de Nuestra Señora de Lourdes, the Basílica Menor de Chiquinquirá, and the Santuario de Monserrate will all host concerts.
The festival will open at the Teatro Mayor Julio Mario Santo Domingo with Verdi’s Nabucco, performed by the National Choir and National Symphony Orchestra of Colombia. This timeless opera will be conducted by Israeli-Argentine maestro Yeruham Scharovsky. The same forces will close the festival with Brahms’s German Requiem, a monumental meditation on consolation and renewal.
Beyond the music and masterclasses that aim to engage students, young musicians, and wider audiences, García’s exhibition is open to the public at Chapinero’s Centro de la Felicidad (Calle 82 No.10-69). Another cornerstone of the festival is to make sacred music accessible to all, with around 70% of all concerts free to the public, including a highly-anticipated concert on Thursday, September 11 (7:00 pm) of Vivaldi’s ‘Gloria’ at the Basilica of Our Lady of Lourdes in Chapinero.
Since its creation in 2011, the International Sacred Music Festival of Bogotá has grown into one of Latin America’s most prominent cultural gatherings. It is part of the Colombian Ministry of Culture’s list of 100 nationally significant events and has been recognized by Mayoralty as a one of the key attractions of the city. In 2022, the festival received the Orden de Isabel la Católica, a Spanish distinction awarded by King Felipe VI.
Piotrowka say these accolades reflect the festival’s dual role: to showcase world-class artists and to nurture Colombia’s own contributions to sacred music. Each year, at least one new commission has expanded the repertoire, ensuring the event is not merely retrospective but also forward-looking.
This year’s theme invites reflection at a time when Colombia, like much of the world, continues to grapple with political tension, social inequality, and ecological crisis. To speak of glory in 2025 is not to escape these realities, “but to understand them through art,” affirms Piotrowska.
García’s Angelopoulos-inspired imagery captures this tension – figures struggling with a past of oppression yet glimpsing new horizons. Piotrowska sees the concerts as an opportunity to pause: “I think it will be a very beautiful experience,” she said, “because everything is created around glory.”
By bringing together diverse traditions – Catholic masses, Protestant chorales, Jewish chants, and Afro-diasporic spirituals – the festival suggests that glory is not a singular idea but a shared human aspiration.
In a city where free outdoor rock and jazz festivals attract tens of thousands, Bogotá’s Sacred Music Festival offers something quieter but no less ambitious. It situates sacred music within the cultural calendar as both heritage and living practice.
As the first notes of Verdi’s chorus of Hebrew slaves echo through the Teatro Mayor next week, audiences will be invited to reflect on exile, deliverance, and the search for transcendence. And as Brahms’s solemn Requiem closes the festival nearly a month later, the theme of glory will have been traced across centuries and continents, through voices both familiar and new.
The full programme is available at www.festivalmusicasacra.com
