SALT 2026 is about PROXIMITY: after each concert, stay to meet the performers and composers and chat with them about your experience!
Concerts
September 1
7:30 p.m.
It Was Inside You All Along
Ensemble Paramirabo
On the festival eve, Ensemble Paramirabo brings to SALT 2026 a program that moves between intimacy, intensity, stillness, and transformation.
September 2
7:30 p.m.
Through Time and Space
Zafraan Ensemble
Ensemble Paramirabo
This concert brings Zafraan Ensemble and Ensemble Paramirabo into close artistic contact. The first half presents Zafraan Ensemble in a program shaped by poetry, memory, repetition, and transformation. After the intermission, the two ensembles perform together, creating a larger shared musical space for four works by composers from different cultural and artistic backgrounds.
September 11
7:30 p.m.
Open Space Arts Society
Inner Time
Liam Hockley
Inner Time invites the audience into the smallest details of sound: breath, resonance, overtones, silence, and the physical presence of a musician in space.
September 12
4:00 p.m.
Temporal Waves
Vancouver Percussion Collective
Four percussionists create a shared world of rhythm, movement, resonance, and physical gesture.
September 13
8:00 a.m.
Mount Tolmie Park
Birdsong: Morning Concert
Musicians of the SALT Experiment
This outdoor event combines music, attentive listening, and a guided nature experience centred on birds and their habitats. Audiences will be invited to listen not only to the performers, but also to the surrounding acoustic environment: birdsong, wind, movement, distance, and silence.
September 13
7:30 p.m.
Birdsong: Evening Concert
SALT Experiment
Birdsong: Evening brings the sounds of birds into the concert hall in an immersive performance, transforming it to a musical bird paradise. New miniatures by young composers from Canada and abroad, inspired by British Columbia bird species, enter into audiovisual dialogue with works by Vivaldi, Couperin, Cage, Respighi, Messiaen, and Hosokawa.
September 19
7:30 p.m.
Wild Truth
Quasar Saxophone Quartet
D. Andrew Stewart, Karlax
Wild Truth brings composers, performers, instruments, bodies, and technology into close creative contact.
September 20
7:30 p.m.
Kurtágiana
SALT Soloists
In 2026, György Kurtág celebrates his 100th birthday. Kurtágiana honours one of the most influential composers of our time in a Canadian context.
Events
September 12 10:00 A.M.
Cattle Point, Uplands Park
Birdsong: Listening and watching walk
Birdsong brings music, attentive listening, and the natural world into close contact. Beginning at Cattle Point, participants will join a guided birdwatching walk through Uplands Park, accompanied by live musical elements that invite us to hear the surrounding landscape in a new way.
September 13 6:00 P.M.
UVic School of Music, Room B037
Birdsong: When Nature Speaks — A Talk with Tina Pearson and Paul Walde
In this multimedia talk, Tina Pearson and Paul Walde, creators of Music for Natural History, share how they transformed the sounds and imagined voices of museum dioramas into live performance—opening a conversation about listening, representation, and our relationship with the more-than-human world.
Have the full experience and learn more about the events, composers, and performers during these exciting weeks.
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Thanks to our sponsors for making this event possible.
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