A bicoastal conductor with Old World sensibilities.
Born in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia (now Slovakia), Martin Majkut graduated from the State Conservatory, serving as Assistant Conductor of the Slovak Philharmonic while earning his Ph.D. in conducting at the Academy of Performing Arts. While there, he also worked with the Slovak Philharmonic, Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra, Slovak State Philharmonic and Slovak Sinfonietta.
Majkut came to the U.S. as a Fulbright scholar in 2003 and earned a D.M.A., his second doctorate, in 2008, from the University of Arizona. He also studied with Gianluigi Gelmetti at the Accademia Musicale Chigiana in Siena, Italy and Salvador Mas Conde at the Wiener Meisterkurse in Vienna, Austria.
He is the Music Director of the Queens Symphony Orchestra in New York, a position he has held since 2017. Performing in a variety of ethnically diverse communities, the orchestra has expanded its season and quickly gained popularity in the dynamic borough of 2.35 million people.
Majkut has also been serving as Music Director of the Rogue Valley Symphony (RVS) in Ashland, Oregon since 2010. The RVS has experienced a remarkable growth under his leadership. The 50th season of the orchestra, with five world premieres and a star-studded line-up of soloists, earned him an invitation to the 2018 League of American Orchestras conference as a featured presenter in the Frontiers: Risk + Reward session. For the 2019/20 "Season of Women," he lined up a roster of exclusively female soloists, representing the broadest swath of backgrounds and ethnicities.
During the pandemic, Majkut has re-imagined a digital season for the Rogue Valley Symphony – a series of films replacing the orchestra's live productions. He has also created a succession of "quarantine videos." Under the title "What Goes Through The Conductor's Head," they offer an insight into a conductor's score study process.
Maestro Majkut's ability to inspire the orchestra and deliver exciting, polished, and powerful performances results in enthused audiences and many sold out concerts. He has been called "amazing, supremely gifted" and "an incomparable, unique and perhaps irreplaceable asset" by the press in Oregon.
In 2021, Majkut looks forward to returning to the Slovak Philharmonic Orchestra and to his appearance with the Greenwich Symphony Orchestra in Connecticut.
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© 2020 by MARTIN MAJKUT. All photography by Christopher Briscoe. Created with Wix.com