LUKA JUHART is a musician, accordionist and music teacher. There is a determination, a stubborn conviction even, in everything he does. For a number of years now, he has been tirelessly devoted to collaborating with contemporary composers, commissioning new works from them and entering into a creative dialogue. To date, he has given over sixty premiere performances of new works, either alone or in various ensembles. He regularly collaborates with Uroš Rojko and Vinko Globokar. As a soloist, he has performed in two of Globokar’s monumental works, Radiographie d’un roman (in Donaueschingen, with the SWR Symphony Orchestra) and Der Engel der Geschichte (with the Slovenian Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Diego Masson). Juhart has collaborated on many occasions with Thomas Larcher, Klaus Huber, Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf, Eduard Demetz, Vito Žuraj, Matej Bonin, Arturo Fuentes and numerous other composers.
Juhart’s in-depth approach to contemporary sound is more than a case of seeking and exploiting a repertoire niche. Today, for example, he still regularly plays Baroque music with ensembles and performers such as Camerata Zurich, Thomas and Patrick Demenga, Christoph Bossert and Volker Jacobsen. Juhart’s approach to contemporary music, too, rejects any closure. As an accordionist, he has never operated merely in the space prescribed by the institution of the Central European music tradition. He likes to improvise and since 2013 also composes for various chamber ensembles. His own works include responses to poetry and contemporary performance techniques, always serving the overall performative effect of the composition.
It is also interesting to note the diversity of the institutions and spaces at which Luka Juhart presents his work and the work of contemporary composers. Although he has performed in renowned concert halls, such as the Alice Tully Hall in New York, Lucerne’s KKL Concert Hall, Royal Albert Hall in London, Musikverein in Vienna, Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, Philharmonie de Paris, Concertgebouw Amsterdam and Tonhalle Zurich, he is one of a growing number of instrumentalists who do not tie their music aesthetics and the traditional underpinnings of their playing exclusively to the traditional environments and spaces of art music. He regularly collaborates with the Zavod Sploh Institute, which focuses primarily on contemporary improvised music and the alternative music scene. The Zavod Sploh Institute and the small independent record label l’innomable released his first CD, “Dialog”, his second CD, “Deconstructing Accordion”, was a coproduction of the Zavod Sploh Institute and NEOS. His performances have also appearedon other releases by NEOS, including a compilation of recordings from the Donaueschingen Festival, an album by Eduard Demetz and a compilation of performances from the Belgian Transit Festival, as well as on releases by other record labels such as ZKP Radiotelevizija Slovenija, Pogus and Helbling.
Juhart has participated in performances of a number of music-performance works by Bojana Šaljić-Podešva, in cooperation with the Slovenian Philharmonic Orchestra under the baton of Beat Furrer. There are performances at major European festivals such as the BCC Proms, Lucerne Festival, Klangspuren Schwaz (Austria), Warsaw Autumn, Transit Festival in Belgium’s Leuven, November Music at the Dutch s’Hertogenbosch and a performance within the framework of the Chamber Music Society of the Lincoln Center. In addition to the orchestras already mentioned above, Juhart has collaborated with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, the RSO Vienna, the Munich Chamber Orchestra, the Saarbrücken Radio Symphony Orchestra and the Mozarteumorchester Salzburg as well as with the ensembles Windkraft and Aventure.
Luka Juhart is an associate professor at the Ljubljana Academy of Music, where he also directs the Department and Studio for Contemporary Music. Within the framework of the Studio, he helps to spread and deepen the view of various directions of new music. For his work at the Academy of Music, Luka Juhart received an Order of Merit of the University of Ljubljana for outstanding pedagogical and research achievements in 2015.
After graduating from the High School for Music in Maribor (Slovenia), where he was in the class of Andrej Lorber, Luka Juhart studied with Prof. Hugo Noth at the Trossingen University of Music in Germany. He completed his postgraduate studies in the masterclass of Prof. Stefan Hussong at the Würzburg University of Music in 2008.