At the close of the season, the Liepāja Symphony Orchestra will once again join forces with Ksenija Sidorova, in a reunion conceived on a scale befitting the occasion under the direction of Guntis Kuzma. The outstanding accordionist, who appeared as the special guest of the Liepāja Symphony New Year’s Eve Concert at the end of 2024, this time, she will be the central figure in the first half of the concert.

In the first half, Ksenija Sidorova appears in two contrasting musical roles, offering two different perspectives on dance.

Tõnu Kõrvits’s Tantsud (Dances), a concerto for accordion and orchestra, was written specifically for Sidorova, who gave its premiere in July 2024 at the Pärnu Music Festival with the Estonian Festival Orchestra, conducted by Paavo Järvi.

The four-movement cycle opens with a solo cadenza and a journey from “Darkness” to Under the Cajun Moon, linking the accordion with echoes of Louisiana Cajun music-making. The remaining three movements transform historical dance forms, though Kõrvits makes no attempt to restore them: instead, these older forms become distinct modes of movement and musical thought within a contemporary concerto.

In Arturs Maskats’s Tango, Sidorova’s part forms part of a broader symphonic landscape. While Kõrvits sets dance forms from different traditions alongside one another, Maskats approaches the tango as an entire cultural phenomenon, encompassing its many faces, from taverns and the music of cities at midnight to the concert hall and the Piazzolla tradition. The familiar dance pulse is more than a rhythmic accompaniment: it emerges from the orchestra’s shifting textures, recedes and returns in another guise, becoming material for the work’s symphonic dramaturgy.

In the second half, dance does not disappear but moves into the very architecture of symphonic form. The finale of Johannes Brahms’s Fourth Symphony is built on a principle akin to the Baroque passacaglia or chaconne: an eight-bar structure provides the foundation for thirty variations, continually changing in melody, rhythm and orchestral colour. It is the passacaglia that reveals a telling connection with Kõrvits’s Tantsud: Kõrvits incorporates an old dance form into the cycle of a contemporary accordion concerto, while Brahms uses it to construct a symphonic finale. In both works, repetition is not a return to the point of departure, but a driving force for change.

From Kõrvits’s dances and Maskats’s tango to Brahms’s passacaglia, the programme continually reshapes the idea of dance and rhythm, allowing the season to end not with a full stop, but with a dance step towards summer.