A total of 50,000 tickets have already been sold for this summer's XXVIII Song and Dance Festival, and tickets for all three performances of the Dance Festival, which takes place first, are already sold out, festival foundation spokesperson Sten Weidebaum confirmed Thursday.

To cope with the high demand, additional stands are to be installed at the Kalev stadium, which hosts the dance festival, and will go on sale via the Piletlevi site at noon on March 18.

The initial batch of tickets to the XXVIII Song and XXI Dance Festival "Iseoma" ("Kinship") went on sale at noon on Monday and within just over 24 hours, 50,000 tickets were sold.

Tickets for the bench sections of Sunday's climactic Song Festival concert have also sold out.

Tickets are, at the time of writing, still available for the general area of the grand concert and for the Song Festival's first day, the Saturday concert.

Interest in the event has surged compared with previous festivals; the first 10,000 tickets went in less than an hour.

Margus Toomla, head of the foundation, said he was encouraged by the high take up and thanked the public for their ongoing support, which he said serves to fuel the hard work of all those taking part.

The Dance Festival seats 30,000, while the Song Festival offers 106,000 spots across two concerts, Toomla said earlier this week.

The XXVIII laulu- ja XXI tantsupidu (XXVIII Song Festival and XXI Dance Festival) will take place from Thursday, July 3 to Sunday, July 6, 2025.

As noted the dance festival is being hosted at the Kalev stadium in Kadriorg; the song festival just up the hill at the Song Festival Grounds (Lauluväljak).

Heli Jürgenson is artistic director, Helena-Mariana Reimann is chief director, and creative director is Helin Pihlap.

While song festivals and dance festivals, and their regional and youth variants, are regular features in the summertime in Estonia, the general Laulupidu is a very special event, and was even name-checked by then U.S. President Barack Obama during a speech he made in Tallinn as part of his official visit a little over a decade ago. The first song festival took place in 1869, and the event continued during the Soviet occupation of Estonia, even as the regime forced choirs to sing songs glorifying the likes of Lenin and Stalin. From the late 1980s and as part of the Singing Revolution, patriotic anthems such as "Mu isamaa on minu arm" were very much back on the agenda.

The general song festival is quinquennial; however, six years have elapsed since the last event in 2019, as rehearsals, etc., were put back one year due to the pandemic.

Excerpts from the 2019 event can be viewed here.

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