The young, exceptional accordionist Pia Madlener is by now a familiar name at the Accordion Festival. While she herself performed in the “Young Talents” section just a few years ago, in 2025 she thrilled the festival audience at the Sargfabrik alongside the Finnish Mäsä Duo and the two Swiss musicians Sämi Zumstein and Roman Britschgi. This year, Pia presents her new solo program, “Adjacency Pairs.” In it, she plays with the audience’s expectations by juxtaposing seemingly contrasting musical worlds and revealing their hidden connections. In doing so, she showcases the full range of her instrument: with playful ease and virtuoso precision, she dances between Baroque elegance and contemporary sound exploration, probes the boundaries of free tonality, and transforms the accordion into a living laboratory of sounds. A joyful, curious, and profound musical delight.

Accordionist Janez Dovč is one of Slovenia’s most prominent contemporary accordionists and composers. Together with tuba player Goran Krmac, with whom he has been performing for more than a decade, he has developed a distinctive sound at the intersection of contemporary composition, improvisation, jazz, folk music, and electroacoustic music. Their unusual combination of instruments opens up a vast sonic space—ranging from intimate acoustic textures to powerful rhythmic passages and spontaneous interplay, all the way to expansive soundscapes. At the International Accordion Festival, Dovč and Krmac will present a program of original compositions that stems from their long-standing collaboration as performers, composers, and musical explorers.
Together, they view tradition as a living material—something that can be transformed, questioned, and reinvented in the moment. (Press release)

An event presented by the Accordion Festival