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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 in 2015, and became the company’s First Kapellmeister.

She excels at large symphonic repertoire — particularly Bartók, Brahms, Dvořák, Shostakovich, Strauss, Stravinsky and Tchaikovsky — and especially at works with a vocal element, including the Requiems of Brahms, Verdi and Fauré and Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde and Fourth Symphony.

At the opera house she has conducted Eugene Onegin, The Maid of Orleans, Oedipus Rex, Tosca, Madama Butterfly and the first Slovenian staging of Philip Glass’s La Belle et la Bête, as well as the ballets Swan Lake, Cacti, Orphic Hymn, HeartMeat and Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, a tribute to Tomaž Pandur. Abroad she has conducted Swan Lake at the Teatro Verdi in Trieste and Doctor Zhivago on tour with the Brno Philharmonic.

She is a regular guest conductor with the Slovenian Philharmonic Orchestra, the Symphony Orchestras of the Slovene National Theatres in Maribor and Ljubljana and the RTV Slovenia Symphony Orchestra. Recent international highlights include the Musikverein Vienna with the Wiener Concert-Verein — in 2025 for the Salieri bicentenary and in 2026 with the world premiere of Johanna Doderer’s Beltane – helles Feuer — and her debut with the Pannon Philharmonic in Pécs.

After musicology studies in Ljubljana she studied conducting in Mannheim, where she founded her own orchestra, Festine, and its family concert series Festinice. She went on to found the Ljubljana International Orchestra, which has hosted more than 800 musicians from 42 countries; its 2018 project marking the centenary of the end of the First World War received a medal from Italian President Sergio Mattarella.

In 2019 she founded the Slovenian Youth Orchestra, a full member of the European Federation of National Youth Orchestras, which under her baton has appeared with Gidon Kremer, Ute Lemper and Lauri Porra, at the Ateneul Român in Bucharest and the Konzerthaus Berlin. In 2022 she launched Music for the Future, personally coordinating the evacuation and integration of 142 young Ukrainian musicians to Ljubljana — guided by the belief that music, not weapons, is how she can help.