📍 April 28 – December 13 | 🏠 At St. Catherine's Church
GM Gyvai presents the festival "World Sounds" in everyone's favorite St. Catherine's Church. This is an ideal place in Vilnius for cozy and sensitive world music concerts.
The festival invites you to immerse yourself in the magical world of music, allowing you to get to know different and rich musical cultures. Discover talented bands from Turkey, Canada/USA/Pakistan, the Middle East, Mongolia, and Armenia.
Program
- 📍 April 28 – Faran Ensemble (Israel)
- 📍 May 19 – Ali Doğan Gönültaş (Turkey)
- 📍 June 3 – Urna & Kroke (Inner Mongolia/Poland)
- 📍 July 10 – Fanna Fi Allah (Canada/Pakistan)
- 📍 December 13 – Naghash Ensemble (Armenia)
Festival information partner:
A 25% discount applies when purchasing 4 or more tickets
A 30% discount applies when purchasing 10 or more tickets. Contact us at +37068613883 or goodmusiclub@gmail.com
Faran Ensemble
Acoustic Desert Fantasy
🗓️ April 28
The Faran Ensemble trio of oud, kamancha, and percussion creates and performs unique music that resonates with the ancient cultures of the Middle East. The name of the ensemble Faran means the valley of a desert river – a dry desert bed that fills with water and life in winter, and dries up in summer. The ensemble, like the river, crosses three countries, defying all artificial human borders. Without words and language barriers, the ensemble’s music tells the musical stories of Persia, Azerbaijan, Arabia, and Turkey, and combines them into a new sound. Each musician creates in his own way, walking the unwritten paths of the eastern melodic scales “Maqam”.
Faran Ensemble encourages listeners to turn to their inner desert, full of emotions and feelings, guided by the view that well-performed music is a platform for inner experience and even more – a gateway to hidden unity through melodies and sounds.
The group was founded in 2009 by three musicians who share similar musical moods and values, and quickly became popular – their video views on Youtube reach millions. In 2023, the ensemble released its third album "The legend of the ocean and the moon", which it will present in Vilnius, at St. Catherine's Church.
Performers:
Roy Smila - kamancha
Refael Ben-Zichry - percussion
Gad Tidhar - oud
Ali Doğan Gönültaş
The Genius of Kurdish Music
🗓️ May 19
The blazing voice of Eastern Anatolia, Ali Doğan Gönültaş, invites you to immerse yourself in a rare authenticity. Gönültaş will present Eastern Anatolian melodies full of feeling, depth and authenticity at St. Catherine's Church and invite you on a timeless journey.
Ali Doğan Gönültaş was born in the mid-1980s in the village of Kiğı in the rugged mountains of Eastern Anatolia, to a Kurdish family where music was an essential way to convey the history of the nation. After his family moved to Istanbul, Ali's singing talent was soon noticed, as he already had a natural gift for musicality, but he did not limit himself to it – Ali studied archaeology and cinema at the university. His studies gave him a wide field of opportunities for research and analysis of sources – he was able to combine his education with music and create a very attractive artistic language based on heritage, talent and excellent scenography.
After ten years and hundreds of concerts, in 2022 Ali Doğan produced and released his first album Kiğı – the result of fifteen years of research, conversations with elders and work on musical arrangements. The album opened the way for performances on the most famous stages in Europe. The impeccable international evaluation of his follow-up album Keyeyi (2024) only confirmed this magic. In 2023 and 2024, Ali performed in 18 countries in Europe and the Middle East, including sold-out prestigious venues such as the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, the Fundação Gulbenkian, the Rudolstadt Festival, WOMEX 2024.
Artists:
Ali Doğan Gönültaş - tanbur, guitar
Zilan Hasret Yıldız - percussion
Fırat Çakılcı - clarinet
URNA and Kroke
Unbridled Music
🗓️ June 3
URNA
Her voice is reminiscent of the whistling of the wind, the coldness of stones, and the scorching heat of the sun. Sometimes it is as rushing as a waterfall, and sometimes as soft as the fluttering wings of a butterfly. Then you understand why many critics and listeners say that her voice is like a small orchestral symphony.” – These are the words of a Swiss critic who heard URNA for the first time.
Born into a family of nomadic herders in the Orda steppes of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Republic (China), from 1989 to 1993 Urna Chahar-Tugchi studied yangqin (Chinese dulcimer) at the Shanghai Conservatory. Since then, the performer has not stopped touring the world and delighting listeners with her impressive voice, which rises through four octaves with elegance and ease.
URNA conveys the spirit of her native land through music. Although her music is rooted in the traditions of her native country, her latest works emphasize free, brushstroke-like improvisations inspired by years of encounters with other cultures and musicians. URNA will perform at St. Catherine's Church with the legendary Polish world music ensemble "Kroke," with whom she released the album "Ser" (2018), which means "Awakening" in Lithuanian.
Kroke
The unique style of the ensemble Kroke (Krakow in Yiddish), originally most associated with klezmer music, draws inspiration from ethnic music from all over the world. The musical compositions they perform, often completely unknown, awaken memories of a long-forgotten world.
One day, Steven Spielberg's wife Kate Capshaw, while he was in Krakow filming Schindler's List, came to the Ariel restaurant, where Kroke often played. One evening, she took her husband to a concert. The director quickly recognized Kroke's talent and invited the band to Jerusalem to perform at the Survivors Reunion ceremony for the survivors of Schindler's List. Spielberg sent a KROKE cassette to Peter Gabriel, who invited the band to the United Kingdom to perform at the WOMAD festival in 1997. This was just the beginning of a great adventure: 20 albums, a soundtrack for a David Lynch film, a nomination for the BBC Radio 3 Awards in the world music category, collaborations with violin virtuoso Nigel Kennedy, and many other achievements mark Kroke's creative path spanning almost three decades. Long-lasting artistic impressions are guaranteed!
Performers:
Urna Chahar-Tugchi - vocals
Tomasz Kukurba - violin
Jerzy Bawoł - accordion
Tomasz Lato - double bass
Fanna-Fi-Allah
Sufi Qawwali Enchanters
🗓️ July 10
Experience Fanna-fi-Allah live, and enter a world of emotional and spiritual intensity, where dervishes whirl, tears of devotion flow, and seekers fall into trance.
Qawwali is a passionate and fiery religious art form prevalent in South Asia - mainly Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Northern India. This Sufi tradition is guided by religious tolerance and the poetry of divine love as a source of wisdom. For nearly 800 years, Qawwali performers have woven poetry and intense rhythm with complex melodies to evoke a state of reverence, devotion, transformation, and ecstasy.
Fanna-Fi-Allah is one of the most popular traditional Qawwali groups of our time. The leader of the Canadian, American, and Pakistani group, Tahir Faridi Qawwalis (real name Geoffrey Lyons), is a Scottish Canadian who began studying North Indian classical music as a teenager. The group has been around for 24 years, has given over 1,500 concerts worldwide, released 12 albums, and created an 8-hour documentary series "Music of the Mystics".
By passing on the flame of the qawwali, the ensemble invites us to reflect on the importance of Sufi ideas in our diverse contemporary societies and how they can become a healing antidote to extremism and xenophobia.
Performers:
Tahir Qawwal - harmony, vocals
Kash Qalandar – tabla, vocals
Chetan Ramlu – harmony, tabla, vocals
Laali Qalandar - vocals
Salim Chishty - vocals
Ali Shan - vocals
Aziz Abbatiello - Whirling Dervish
Naghash Ensemble
Divine and Meaningful Music
🗓️ December 13
During the festive season, the world-renowned Armenian Naghash Ensemble will bring depth and meaning to our hearts. Having performed at prestigious festivals and cultural events around the world, the ensemble combines the earthy spirituality of Armenian folk songs, new classical music, contemporary post-minimalism, and the energy of rock and jazz. Three magnificent female vocalists and four of Armenia’s finest instrumentalists (duduk, lute, dhol, and piano) will perform a new generation of music with a unique sound, which Rolling Stone magazine described as “A Moment of Grace and Meditation.” Part folk, part classical, deeply moving music that fosters feelings of rebirth and mercy.
The founder of the ensemble, American Armenian composer John Hodian, adapted sacred 15th-century texts of the Armenian mystic, poet, and priest Mkrtich Naghash. Mkrtich Naghash is considered one of the most important representatives of the golden age of Armenian poetry. The words of this luminary are deep and simple, presented in a colloquial form, but poetic, speaking of the vanity of the world, greed, exile and, of course, love.
The divine and meaningful music of the Naghash Ensemble in St. Catherine's Church is an enchanting elixir that will allow you to rise high above everyday life.
Performers:
Hasmik Baghdasaryan – soprano
Tatevik Movsesyan – soprano
Shahane Zalyan – viola
Tigran Hovhannisyan – dhol
Aram Nikoghosyan – lute
Harutyun Chkolyan – duduk
John Hodian – piano/composer
A 25% discount applies when purchasing 4 or more tickets
A 30% discount applies when purchasing 10 or more tickets. Contact us at +37068613883 or goodmusiclub@gmail.com
Festival sponsors
