Tick-tock, tick-tock... You can hear them, right? The hands on the clocks are merciless. Especially when we're having a good time. When we are in the company of the people we love and enjoy moments that touch the heart together.

Kot at the Maribor Festival, where dedicated musicians delighted and spoiled us with rich musical gifts for eleven days and evenings. They showed us how closely intertwined the (musical) roots of the European space are, and proved that our city is so special and rich in the gust of history precisely because of the thick layer of various grains of dust that the centuries-old winds deposited on the thresholds of its houses. Also thanks to top festival concerts, where canonical classical masterpieces and modern music, sevdah and jazz, and cabaret and folk songs have merged into one, now in Maribor we are also getting to know what cultural centers in the world have already turned to their advantage. That it is precisely the layering of different cultural influences that is the fertile soil that enables the most luxuriant growth. The seed is sown. It takes time to germinate. Tick-tock, tick-tock...

 The Festival Maribor 2025 will be dedicated to time, its reflections in us and in the world. Mate Bekavac will hold a mirror to it and try to capture its flow, that inexorable passing that constantly gives birth to the new and exciting, as well as oblivion and decay. Tick-tock, tick-tock...

Vivaldi's Four Seasons, which will be reflected in Philip Glass's American Seasons, as well as the more jazzy ones, will remind us that we live in a time of great changes, which not even the sky above us can defy. We will learn how the exciting beauty of the new and the precious beauty of the old merge into the same flow of time with the music of Toru Takemitsu and George Crumb, in which we will look for reflections of Chopin's nocturnes and other evening and night compositions from the treasury of classical literature. It will be an exciting journey into the past, which we dedicate to children. Jurassic Trip, six prehistoric miniatures by Guillaume Connesson, will bring dinosaurs to life like the popular film of the same title. We will feel the passing and the oblivion in the ruins of the decaying Viltuš mansion and some other not so ordinary concert venues, which have in common that they are mercilessly eaten away by the teeth of time under the cobwebs of oblivion. Tick-tock, tick-tock...

But we will also look to the future. Classical music, for example. Her metronomes find it increasingly difficult to keep up with the frenetic madness of modernity. Will we be able to capture it, tune it to the coming times and offer it to new generations of listeners? How much time do we have left? Tick-tock, tick-tock...

Now or never! Reflections on the theme of time. Festival Maribor 2025, from September 11 to 20.