Biography
Guitarist Mak Grgic stands out for the breadth of his repertory, which has opened doors to diverse recording ventures and partnerships across artistic fields while also spurring him to establish multiple ensembles that continue to shape contemporary programming.
Born March 8, 1987, in Ljubljana, Slovenia, Grgic—whose Slovenian spelling is Grgić—drops the diacritic when writing his name for English-speaking audiences. Early on he distinguished himself both as Slovenia’s top-ranked mathematics student and as a martial-arts competitor, pursuits he maintained even after launching a concert career on the guitar until a hand injury prompted a decisive shift toward music alone. His formal training began at Zagreb’s Elly Bašić Music Academy, continued at Vienna’s Akademie für Musik und darstellende Kunst under Alvaro Pierri, and culminated in the United States at USC, where his teachers included William Kanengiser, Scott Tennant, and Brian Head; he also completed coursework in the university’s arts-leadership curriculum.
Those studies in turn informed several organizations he helped launch, among them the European guitar-festival network EuroStrings, the Zagreb Guitar Festival, and Music@Rush Hour in Los Angeles. He created the contemporary octet DC8 along with the Duo Deloro and FretX Duo, and he served a two-year term as artist-in-residence with the Da Camera Society Chamber Music Series in Los Angeles. At twenty-two he made his orchestral debut as soloist with the St. Petersburg Symphony Orchestra in Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez, and he issued his first commercial recording, Cinema Verismo, on the Marquis Classics label in 2014.
Grgic’s recital itinerary has since encompassed such landmark halls as Vienna’s Musikverein, the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. The scope of his collaborations is equally wide, embracing the JACK Quartet, violinist Augustin Hadelich, the Assad Brothers, and pop vocalist k.d. lang, whose 2018 Ingénue Redux Tour he supported as an opening act for several dates. An ongoing duo partnership with pianist Paul Cardall began in 2020, and during the coronavirus pandemic he assembled the 500-member Virtual Guitar Orchestra. Convinced that genre-spanning performances attract fresh audiences, he devoted his 2019 album Balkanisms to folk repertoire from his native region; on the MicroFest label he further explored microtonal and alternate tunings with MAKrotonal (2018) and MAK/Bach (2021). His 2022 release A Night in Upper Town: The Music of Zoran Krajacic earned a Grammy Award nomination for Best Classical Instrumental Solo despite minimal promotional support, and in 2024 he appeared as an ensemble member on David Crowell: Point/Cloud.
Born March 8, 1987, in Ljubljana, Slovenia, Grgic—whose Slovenian spelling is Grgić—drops the diacritic when writing his name for English-speaking audiences. Early on he distinguished himself both as Slovenia’s top-ranked mathematics student and as a martial-arts competitor, pursuits he maintained even after launching a concert career on the guitar until a hand injury prompted a decisive shift toward music alone. His formal training began at Zagreb’s Elly Bašić Music Academy, continued at Vienna’s Akademie für Musik und darstellende Kunst under Alvaro Pierri, and culminated in the United States at USC, where his teachers included William Kanengiser, Scott Tennant, and Brian Head; he also completed coursework in the university’s arts-leadership curriculum.
Those studies in turn informed several organizations he helped launch, among them the European guitar-festival network EuroStrings, the Zagreb Guitar Festival, and Music@Rush Hour in Los Angeles. He created the contemporary octet DC8 along with the Duo Deloro and FretX Duo, and he served a two-year term as artist-in-residence with the Da Camera Society Chamber Music Series in Los Angeles. At twenty-two he made his orchestral debut as soloist with the St. Petersburg Symphony Orchestra in Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez, and he issued his first commercial recording, Cinema Verismo, on the Marquis Classics label in 2014.
Grgic’s recital itinerary has since encompassed such landmark halls as Vienna’s Musikverein, the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. The scope of his collaborations is equally wide, embracing the JACK Quartet, violinist Augustin Hadelich, the Assad Brothers, and pop vocalist k.d. lang, whose 2018 Ingénue Redux Tour he supported as an opening act for several dates. An ongoing duo partnership with pianist Paul Cardall began in 2020, and during the coronavirus pandemic he assembled the 500-member Virtual Guitar Orchestra. Convinced that genre-spanning performances attract fresh audiences, he devoted his 2019 album Balkanisms to folk repertoire from his native region; on the MicroFest label he further explored microtonal and alternate tunings with MAKrotonal (2018) and MAK/Bach (2021). His 2022 release A Night in Upper Town: The Music of Zoran Krajacic earned a Grammy Award nomination for Best Classical Instrumental Solo despite minimal promotional support, and in 2024 he appeared as an ensemble member on David Crowell: Point/Cloud.
Albums
Entourer
2024
Neon Nights
2024
Peaceful Guitar
2022
Noć na gornjem gradu - Glazba Zorana Krajačića
2022
A Night in Upper Town - The Music of Zoran Krajacic
2022
Mak|Bach
2021
Balkanisms: Guitar Music from the Balkans
2019
Makrotonal Guitar
2018
Cinema Verismo
2014
Singles
