Ksenija Sidorova

Ksenija Sidorova began the accordion at six in Riga, encouraged by her grandmother and taught by Marija Gasele, and carried the instrument to Owen Murray's class at the Royal Academy of Music in London, which made her an Associate in 2016 and a Fellow in 2021. Her programmes run from Bach through Piazzolla and Erkki-Sven Tüür to concertos written for her, and she has played with the Philharmonia, the BBC Symphony, the Münchner Philharmoniker, the Orchestre National de France and the Atlanta and Cincinnati symphony orchestras. Two Alpha discs, Piazzolla Reflections and Crossroads, show the span of that repertoire. She was heard in Václav Trojan's Fairy Tales in İzmir in May 2025; a performance of Dobrinka Tabakova's accordion concerto with the Sofia Philharmonic was announced for June 2025. She has had works written for her by Tõnu Kõrvits, whose Dances she gave with Paavo Järvi and the Estonian Festival Orchestra at Pärnu, by Sergey Akhunov and by Arturs Maskats, whose accordion concerto she recorded with the Latvian National Symphony Orchestra and Andris Poga. Her earlier discs include Classical Accordion of 2011, Fairy Tales with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales in 2013 and a Carmen for Deutsche Grammophon in 2016, which brought her the ECHO instrumentalist of the year award in 2017. In May 2012 she was the first recipient of the international prize of the Bryn Terfel Foundation.