Živa Ploj Peršuh

Conductor

Živa Ploj Peršuh has established herself on the Slovenian music scene as a conductor who delights audiences with her fresh and convincing performances. She is one of Slovenia’s most accomplished conductors of her generation, equally at home on the concert stage and in the opera house. She made history as the first woman ever to conduct at the Slovenian National Theatre Opera and Ballet Ljubljana, making her debut with Richard Strauss’s Salome and was immediately re-invited to lead both opera and ballet productions. She is a versatile conductor passionate about helping young musicians with her boundless energy and ability to get ambitious projects off the ground.

She excels at large symphonic repertoire, particularly works by Bartók, Brahms, Dvorák Shostakovich, Strauss, Stravinsky and Tchaikovsky, and especially works with a vocal element – including the Requiems of Brahms, Verdi and Fauré as well as Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde and 4^th Symphony – drawing on her experience in the opera world.

Her opera repertoire includes Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin and The Maid of Orleans, Beethoven’s Fidelio, Hans Krása’s Brundibar, Mozart’s The Magic Flute, Johann Strauss’s Salome, Philip Glass’s La Belle et la Bête, Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Puccini’s Madame Butterfly and Tosca, and Verdi’s Macbeth to name but a few.

After completing her musicology studies in Ljubljana she studied orchestral and choir conducting in Mannheim, Germany. By the end of her studies in Mannheim she had established her own orchestra Festine, with the aim of connecting professional musicians from Slovenia and elsewhere in Europe with young Slovenian musicians and to coach them in contemporary music performance. As part of her work with Festine Živa is committed to the education of children and young musicians, creating the family concert series Festinice whose innovative concerts incorporate theatre, silent film, paintings and dance to attract wider audiences.

Živa established the Ljubljana International Orchestra, formed of musicians from around the world, which has toured to Austria, Croatia, Italy, Serbia, Spain and the UK. The orchestra attracted international soloists such as Wolfram Christ, Gregory Ahss, Konstantin Pfiz, Reinhold Friedrich and others and has received awards from the presidents of Slovenia and Italy.

In 2019 Živa established the Slovenian Youth Orchestra in conjunction with international and local partners. The orchestra has become an important symbol of Slovenian culture, standing alongside more established European national youth orchestras accepted in 2022 as a full member of the European Federation of National Youth Orchestras.

That same year she launched Music for the Future — a humanitarian project born out of the war in Ukraine, guided by the belief that music, not weapons, is how she can help — personally coordinating the evacuation and integration of 142 young Ukrainian musicians to Ljubljana, where they formed a symphony orchestra that performed across Europe under her baton, with the support of violinist Gidon Kremer www.future.smo.ngo

Aside from her own projects Živa has been a regular guest conductor with the Slovenian Philharmonic Orchestra, the Symphony Orchestras of the Slovene National Theatre in Maribor and Ljubljana, and the RTV Slovenia Symphony Orchestra. She has conducted in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the UK and many countries across Europe and North Africa.

Živa first appeared at the Slovenian National Theatre Opera in Ljubljana conducting Richard Strauss’s Salome in 2015. Since then she has conducted countless new productions, most recently Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex, Tchaikovsky’s The Maid of Orleans and Puccini’s Tosca, leading to her appointment as First Kapellmeister in 2015.

She conducted the new ballet HeartMeat, by celebrated choreographers Rosana Hribar and Gregor Luštek. She was invited to conduct Alexander Ekman’s new ballet Cacti, as well as Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, Verdi’s Otello, Puccini’s Madame Butterfly and the contemporary ballet Symphony of Sorrowful Songs with music by Gorecki, the latter as a tribute to the late theatre director Tomaž Pandur.

Outside Slovenia she has conducted Swan Lake at the Teatro Verdi in Trieste to great acclaim and stepped in for the ballet Doctor Zhivago (with music by Shostakovich and Rachmaninov) on tour with Brno Philharmonic.

“The musical side of the production was under the direction of Živa Ploj Peršuh, who put in a polished performance conducting the Orkester SNG Opera in balet Ljubljana. She produced an energetic reading which drove the narrative forward. Peršuh maintained an excellent control of the tempi and dynamics, which both reflected and created the changing nature of the drama, as it quickly moved from scene to scene, capturing the underlying pulse of the work. She was respectful to the singers’ needs and was also successful in exploiting the interesting orchestral textures of the score.”

OperaWire (La Belle et la Bête, review)