Art & Culture

14th Chania Chamber Music Festival — Dialogues Through Time

Seven nights of world-class chamber music, five at Platanias and two free inside the ancient theatre at Aptera.

This is the quiet giant of the Chania summer. For fourteen years the Chamber Music Festival has been pulling soloists who normally play Amsterdam and Vienna onto a stage in Platanias, and it remains startlingly good value: €15 a concert, €7 if you are a student. Artistic director Giorgos Mathioulakis has built the 2026 edition around "Dialogues Through Time", pairing Beethoven and Enescu, Bartók and Weber, Shostakovich and Mozart. Five concerts run at the Minoa Palace conference centre between 24 and 31 August, with a free talk on 27 August. Then the festival moves to the ancient theatre at Aptera on 3 and 4 September for two concerts that are free with an entry ticket, and hearing Brahms in a 2,000-year-old Greek theatre above Souda Bay is the sort of evening you will still be describing years later. Book the Aptera nights the moment tickets are released, they go.