From September 30 to November 30, 2025, Kazan will host the 3rd International Festival and Laboratory of Contemporary Music Synesthesia Lab. The program will feature concerts, lectures, and performance masterclasses across multiple venues in the city.
The theme of Synesthesia Lab 2025 is “Synchronization.” This year’s festival emphasizes interdisciplinarity and unconventional formats, bringing together music, visual art, performance, cinema, science, and digital technologies. Highlights include the electroacoustic multimedia mystery Neon Nature, the experimental film odyssey Synchronization–4, the dark ambient improvisation project RITИAL, the tribute concert Voices dedicated to Kazan’s composer school, and the city’s first-ever TRIBUTE: SOFIA GUBAIDULINA project.
The composer laboratory attracted record interest this year: 232 applications from 35 countries. Participants wrote new works for leading Russian contemporary music ensembles and performers, including the Sofia Gubaidulina Center for Contemporary Music Orchestra, the Tatar State Academic Theater Orchestra, the Moscow Contemporary Music Ensemble (MCME), CEAM Artists, Studio for New Music, Ensemble Synesthesia, Kreativ, Rhythm Space, and multi-instrumentalist Ignat Krasikov.
The festival will open on September 30 in Black Lake Park with Neon Nature, an electroacoustic multimedia mystery created by composer Roman Parkhomenko and 3D artist Rita Valeeva. The park will be transformed into a giant greenhouse, where a living tree becomes a musical instrument through art and science technologies, combining light, sound, and live performance by soloists of MCME, Ensemble Synesthesia, and Rhythm Space.
On October 1, the Gallery of Contemporary Art will host a lecture by opera and ballet dramaturg Bogdan Korolyok titled “New Music: There and Back Again,” followed by a public talk with the creators of Neon Nature. The next day, the festival’s educational program moves to the Kazan State Conservatory, featuring lectures by musicologist Evgenia Krivitskaya and masterclasses with MCME soloists Mikhail Dubov (piano) and Oleg Tantsov (clarinet). That evening, Kazan City Hall will present TRIBUTE: SOFIA GUBAIDULINA, with performances by the Gubaidulina Center Orchestra, MCME, and Rhythm Space.
The program continues with a series of premieres. On October 3, MCME will perform new works by Nikifor Yakovlev, Loïc Le Roux, Filippo Lepre, and Alireza Golamian, alongside pieces by Salvatore Sciarrino, Helmut Lachenmann, and Roman Parkhomenko. On October 9, the Kreativ folk instrument ensemble introduces new compositions by Anton Shukov, Olga Shaidullina, Lilia Iskhakova, Vitaly Kharisov, Wen Ziyang, Alex Porter, and Jonathan Domingo. On October 11, music critic Nadezhda Travina will lecture at the Sofia Gubaidulina Center, while the art space Werk hosts the premiere of RITИAL, a dark ambient improvisation blending experimental electronics, classical instruments, and the rare contrabass clarinet in a large-scale collaboration.
Later in the fall, CEAM Artists will present premieres by Karolina Carrizo, Michele Selvaggi, and Dani Fisco, alongside works by Guillermo Daniel Leonardini Gutierrez, Anna Pospelova, Alexander Khubeev, and Nikolai Popov. The Studio for New Music Ensemble will perform premieres by Mengyuan Luo, Arshia Samsamini, Pablo Rubino Lindner, Alina Mukhametrakhimova, and Anzhelika Gabibova, as well as works by Mehdi Hosseini and Georges Aperghis. The Gubaidulina Center Orchestra, conducted by Roman Parkhomenko, will unveil premieres by Matteo Cenerini, Francesco Mariotti, and Corey Ryder, and present the Russian premiere of a work by Detsing Wen.
On November 20, the Kamal Theater will host Voices, a special project juxtaposing works by Kazan’s classical composers with new pieces by Konstantin Komoltsev and Natalia Prokopenko, dedicated to the memory of Sofia Gubaidulina. The theater’s orchestra, conducted by Daniyar Sokolov, will perform these premieres alongside works by Gubaidulina, Lorenz Blinov, Alexander Mirgorodsky, Leonid Lyubovsky, and Renat Yenikeyev.
The festival will close in late November with the premiere of Synchronization–4, an experimental film-odyssey by Roman Parkhomenko and Vladimir Zhalnin, presented at the Kamal Theater’s Black Box. Combining cinema, music, light, and audience perception, the performance will feature musicians of the Kamal Theater Orchestra in a multidisciplinary role. Preceding the premiere, cultural theorist Sergey Uvarov will give a lecture on music in cinema at the National Library of Tatarstan, followed by a public talk with the project’s creators. The Library will also screen 4/4, a new documentary about Kazan composers Roman Parkhomenko, Lilia Iskhakova, Milyausha Khairullina, and Roman Salakhutdinov.
The full program is available on the festival’s official website.