Maja Horvat

Tillett Debut Artists 2022

Maja Horvat communicates the spiritual power of music through her performances, offering joy and comfort which enable her audience members to develop their own unique and meaningful connection with the Arts. She explores the full range of magic and versatility of which the violin is capable through her work as a soloist, chamber musician and in collaboration with ensembles, orchestras and composers all over the world. While constantly exploring masterpieces of all eras, Maja’s true passion is giving contemporary works a good start in life and finding fresh resonance in lesser-known gems of 20th-century repertoire.

Maja gave her debut performance at Wigmore Hall in 2021 as first violinist of the Brompton Quartet, of which she is a founding member and with whom she gives frequent world premieres. They won the St. Martin-in-the-Fields Chamber Music Competition and have collaborated with record producer Andrew Keener on a forthcoming release. Other recent collaborations include a year-long partnership with Noah Max on a complete performance of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Tierkreis cycle, a series of duo concerts across Slovenia with cellist Ema Grćman and Echo Ensemble’s broadcast of Olivier Messiaen’s masterpiece Quartet for the End of Time. She has performed with some of the world’s most prominent chamber musicians including Marcelo Nisinman, Nino Gvedatze, Vladimir Mendelssohn, Maja Bogdanović and Thomas Carroll.

In 2019 Maja was awarded the Royal Philharmonic Society’s Emily AndersonPrize for an outstanding violinist. She has performed as a soloist with orchestras including the Slovenian Philharmonic Orchestra and Chamber Orchestra, the National Polish Radio Symphony Orchestra, Chamber Orchestra Mladi Solisti and the Mendelssohn Chamber Orchestra. She has appeared at festivals including the Tartini Festival, Stift International Music Festival, ChamberJamDüsseldorf and Festival Ljubljana. Among other accolades, Maja has won the Temsig Slovenian National Competition and the International Tartini Competition; she was awarded the Special Szymanowski Prize at the inaugural Karol Szymanowski International Music Competition. Maja is also an activeorchestral member. She has performed as concertmaster of the EchoEnsemble and the Royal College of Music’s Philharmonic and SymphonyOrchestras. She has played with Symphonisches Orchester der JeunesseLeibnitz, Ljubljana International Orchestra the Symphony Orchestra at theConservatory of Music and Ballet in Ljubljana.

One of the most talented, truly charismatic violinists I have come across, with a rare personal voice and a huge passion for music and the violin.

It was around the age of three that Maja felt sure that she wanted to dedicateher life to playing the violin. She finally began learning aged seven. Her firstteacher was Bojan Ristić at the Music School Jesenice in Slovenia, where shelater studied with Blanka Piotrovska. While still in Jesenice, Maja performed asa soloist in venues across Slovenia as well as in Austria, Germany, Croatia, Italyand the Czech Republic. In 2015 she graduated the Conservatory for Music andBallet Ljubljana, where she learned with Volodja Balžalorsky. As a Victor andLillian Hochhauser Scholar at the RCM in London, Maja studied with Daniel Rowland and Leonid Kerbel while participating in masterclasses with internationally-acclaimed performers such as Maxim Vengerov, Nicola Benedetti, Ivry Gitlis, Saewon Suh, Anton Martynov, Vasilij Meljnikov, Igor Ozim and Wonji Kim Ozim. She is currently studying for her Artist Diploma atthe RCM under the tutelage of Alina Ibragimova.