From 19 to 21 June 2026, Grodno near Międzyzdroje will once again become a meeting point for musicians from Poland and Germany. For the second time, artists will create a shared space for different sounds, generations and styles.

This year marks the second edition of a festival born from the conviction that music is a language we can communicate in regardless of national, cultural or generational borders. The programme for this year’s festival was prepared by its artistic curators, Atom String Quartet. The quartet invited artists representing very different musical traditions and sensibilities – from tango and improvised music, through lyrical post-romanticism, to jazz-rock fusion. The three festival evenings have been conceived as three separate chapters of a story: Beginning, Dialogue and Contrast, each with its own mood and its own way of carrying on a musical conversation.

19 June | Beginning

The festival will open with a concert specially commissioned for Universum Festival – a premiere event bringing together, for the first time in this configuration: Grażyna Auguścik (vocals), Bester Quartet (Jarosław Bester – accordion, Dawid Lubowicz – violin, Maciej Adamczak – double bass, Ryszard Pałka – drums), Władysław Adzik Sendecki (piano), Sebastian Studnitzky (trumpet) and Krzysztof Lenczowski (cello).

Artistic direction for the evening will be in the hands of Jarosław Bester and Grażyna Auguścik, artists united by a long-standing friendship, which gives this opening a particularly personal character. The programme will feature compositions by John Zorn and Dawid Bajgelman, alongside original works by the artists themselves, moving between jazz, tango, European improvised music and world music.

20 June | Dialogue

The second day of the festival is an evening built around the idea of conversation carried out through music. It will open with a premiere concert made up of two solo sets followed by a joint final duet – on stage, Jadźka Kłapa and Sebastian Studnitzky, both multi-instrumentalists, will each present instrumental-vocal pieces connected to the evening’s theme in their solo segments, before joining forces for one shared performance.

The second concert of the evening brings together Władysław Adzik Sendecki, Grażyna Auguścik and Atom String Quartet. The programme will include the cycle „Le jardin oublié” („The Forgotten Garden”) – compositions by the brothers Stefan and Vladyslav Sendecki, in which romantic postmodernism intertwines with broad, ballad-like sound, energetic improvisational passages and a distinctly Slavic lyricism.

Both concerts on this day, like the festival’s opening, are premiere events commissioned specially by Universum Festival.

21 June | Contrast

The festival’s final day brings a clash of two entirely different musical worlds. First on stage will be Roman Babik (piano) together with Atom String Quartet, who will perform the Polish concert premiere of the album „Might Be A Spring”.

The festival will close with the Oliver Herlitzka Quintet from Germany – featuring Oliver Herlitzka (guitar), Artur Rutkevich (saxophone), Philipp Krätzer (keyboards), Andreas Böhm (bass guitar) and Leon Saleh (drums). With a sound rooted in jazz rock and fusion, the band will present material from their latest album, „Between Edges”.

Organisers and admission

The festival is organised by the European Fund for the Development of Polish Villages – Centre for International Cooperation in Grodno near Międzyzdroje, together with the German association polenmARkt.

Admission to all concerts is free of charge, based on free tickets available for collection at: the Wolin Municipal Public Library in Wolin and its branches in Kołczewo and Wisełka, the Międzyzdroje Municipal Public Library, and CWM Grodno near Międzyzdroje.

The project „Universum Festival – Art Without Borders / Universum Festival – Kunst ohne Grenzen” is co-financed by the European Union through the Small Project Fund of the Interreg VI A Mecklenburg-Vorpommern / Brandenburg / Poland 2021–2027 Cooperation Programme.