This year's most ambitious contemporary music event in the Baltics - the festival "Baltic Music Days 2026" - will be enriched with a special, philosophical and musically rich program "Kairos / Chronos" at the Liepāja Concert Hall "Lielais dzintars" on April 10 at 7:00 PM by the Liepāja Symphony Orchestra under the direction of conductor Jānis Liepiņš.
The Baltic Music Days festival, which will take place in Riga and Liepāja from 9 to 17 April, is the central contemporary music event in the Baltic States, rotating between Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania. This year, the Baltic Music Days begins close cooperation with the Nordic Music Days and the composers' unions of Finland, Sweden, Iceland, Norway, Denmark, Scotland and the Faroe Islands.
“Baltic Music Days 2026” invites listeners to delve into the diverse experience of time. The motto “We live in other times” emphasizes both the different historical experiences of the Baltic States and the different interpretations of contemporary music on how time is perceived and experienced.
At one moment everything rushes forward – news, work, deadlines, traffic, images on screens. And then, suddenly, there comes a moment when time seems to stop: in sound, in silence, in revelation. This concert unfolds between these two states – between time that carries us relentlessly forward and the suspended instant to which Faust pleads: “Stay a while – you are so beautiful!”
Liepāja Symphony Orchestra invites listeners to embark on a journey between these states – somewhere between dawn light and trance, fragmentation and continuous pulsating movement, inner turmoil and the morning star showing the way.
The mythological work of Latvian composer Gundega Šmite, who lives in Greece, will lead us into the liminal hour of dawn, where time has only just begun to breathe and a new light enters the world – a work for which the composer received Latvia’s highest music award. In the magical music of Estonian composer Helena Tulve, love becomes a guiding point through a changing world; inspired by Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116, it stands as something constant to hold onto when everything around us shifts.
A particularly striking Kairos moment will be created by a work from Icelandic composer Hildur Guðnadóttir, in which the orchestra includes a performer who produces no sound at all. This act of silence subtly alters our perception, sharpening our listening and revealing the pervasive nature of sound itself.
Time can also fracture and reweave itself. In Dominykas Digimas’s music, it flickers in fragments like a haze of consciousness, while the saxophone concerto by Latvian composer Mārtiņš Viļums, who lives in Lithuania, is a surge of energy – at times wild, at times hypnotic – revealing the intensity of time in motion.
At the heart of the concert will be three special events: three world premieres – Candela by Jānis Petraškevičs, Up-Time by Ilona Breģe, and Per Sense by Dominykas Digimas. These new works are born for this specific time and place, allowing contemporary music to be experienced as a living event whose moment of creation we can witness. One speaks of a lantern illuminating subterranean darkness, another reveals multiple temporal layers rushing simultaneously toward the future, while the third stands as a model example of Kairos.
Kairos / Chronos is not a concert in which time is measured in minutes. It is a concert in which time is experienced – as flow, as sudden illumination, as light and shadow. And perhaps it is precisely through such listening that we can come closer to understanding what it means to live in different times.
