Barezzi Festival 2026: the first announcements of the twentieth edition
The Barezzi Festival opens its twentieth edition — 10 to 13 December, across theatres in Parma, Busseto and Fidenza — with Peter Hook & The Light, Arab Strap, Sleaford Mods, Glen Hansard, John Grant and Gaia Banfi. The programme includes two Italy-exclusive dates and will grow in the coming weeks. Twenty years of programming open under the banner of “20 anni di ebbrezza musicale”: an expression that captures what takes place at Barezzi, where live music becomes transport, suspension, an intensification of listening, shared vibration and resonance between artists, audience and place.
The Demise of Planet X by Sleaford Mods, released in January 2026, broadens the scope of the Nottingham duo: Jason Williamson’s voice over Andrew Fearn’s electronic beats now shares space with Aldous Harding, Sue Tompkins of Life Without Buildings, rapper Snowy and soul singer Liam Bailey. Williamson has described the record as shaped by “immense uncertainty” and “mass trauma.” Arab Strap’s eighth album, I’m totally fine with it don’t give a fuck anymore, released in May 2024, is the most abrasive work of the stretch that began with Aidan Moffat and Malcolm Middleton’s return in 2016.
The title comes from a message sent by their live drummer, and the record honours it: Moffat’s writing has grown more clipped, Middleton’s sound more taut. On his sixth solo album, The Art of the Lie (June 2024), John Grant takes the electronic work further — the thread running through his output since Pale Green Ghosts. Grant is one of the few songwriters capable of holding ironic and confessional registers together inside the same song, and with each record moves the balance slightly.
Glen Hansard recorded Don’t Settle — Transmissions East & West at the Funkhaus in Berlin — the former East German broadcasting complex — in April 2025. A live project in two volumes, the first due on 24 April 2026, it spans thirty years of songs from The Frames and The Swell Season through to his solo records. For Hansard the stage has always been the original form of the song; the recording, its derivative.
Peter Hook dedicates 2026 to the twenty-fifth anniversary of Get Ready, New Order’s seventh album, dedicated to their manager Rob Gretton, who died in 1999. With over eight hundred concerts behind them, Peter Hook & The Light have moved through the entire Joy Division and New Order catalogue, album by album, in a project that has turned the reclaiming of a sound into a working method. Gaia Banfi is the only Italian artist in the first announcement: daughter of Baffo Banfi, keyboardist with Biglietto per l’Inferno, and a graduate in Jazz Voice from the Bologna Conservatory, she released La Maccaia in April 2025 on Trovarobato — a record that folds together singer-songwriter craft, electronics and vocal experimentation with an ease that is rare in the Italian scene. After Trans Musicales in Rennes and Eurosonic in Groningen, Barezzi is the right stage to place her in an international context.
Six different origins — Manchester, Falkirk, Nottingham, Dublin, Michigan via Reykjavík, Bologna — and six ideas of music that almost never converge. Hook’s bass, one of the most distinctive timbral signatures in post-punk, and Williamson’s spoken word occupy entirely separate territory, as do Moffat’s terseness, Grant’s baritone and Banfi’s vocal electronics.
Hansard’s concert and Williamson’s set — one man and a laptop — will ask the same theatre to accommodate two registers that could hardly be further apart. Barezzi has always worked this way: Tinariwen and Lankum within weeks of each other in 2024, Iosonouncane and Fontaines D.C. in the same Battiato edition of 2021, Spiritualized and Tom Smith of Editors at the Teatro Regio in 2025. Distant musical languages, placed in the same rooms. Over twenty years of programming, the festival has built its identity on exactly that: bringing voices to the theatres of Emilia that would elsewhere remain separate, and letting them sound in the same acoustic space.
The Barezzi Festival, conceived and directed by Giovanni Sparano, takes its name from Antonio Barezzi, the Busseto patron who recognised Giuseppe Verdi’s talent and supported his studies and early career. It is organised by the cultural association Luce in co-production with the Fondazione Teatro Regio di Parma, with the support of the Municipality of Parma, the Casa della Musica di Parma and the Emilia-Romagna Region, and with the backing of Fondazione Cariparma, “Parma io ci sto!”, Gruppo Chiesi and Conad Centro Nord.
The full programme will be announced in the coming weeks.