QSO’s Music Director

Photo: Christopher Briscoe

Born in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia (now Slovakia), Majkut graduated from the State Conservatory and served as Assistant Conductor of the Slovak Philharmonic while
earning his Ph.D. in conducting at the Academy of Performing Arts. While studying, he 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, at 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. Majkut has 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 and is enjoying an unprecedented level of support and enthusiasm in the community. The 50 th  season of the orchestra, with five world premieres and a star-studded line-up of soloists, earned him an invitation to the June 2018 League of American Orchestras conference as a featured presenter in the Frontiers: Risk + Reward session. 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. Starting with the 2017/18 season, Maestro Majkut assumed the music directorship of the Queens Symphony Orchestra in New York. Performing in a variety of ethnically diverse communities, the orchestra is quickly gaining popularity in the dynamic borough of 2.35 million people.
Majkut is looking forward to his return to the Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava, Slovakia in spring of 2019. He was invited to conduct a program celebrating the 70 the anniversary of his alma mater.