Composer of the Season

His music unfolds slowly, yet with great intensity. Evocative soundscapes emerge, linger and transform, almost imperceptibly. Time seems to stretch – at times even to stand still. During the 2026/27 season, he is Composer of the season at Konserthuset Stockholm.

Djuro Zivkovic was born in Belgrade in 1975 and has been active in Sweden since the turn of the millennium. His musical path began in his native country, where he studied violin and composition at the Faculty of Music in Belgrade during the 1990s.

He later continued his studies in Stockholm at the Royal College of Music, deepening his violin studies with Karl-Ove Mannberg and composition with Pär Lindgren. The Central European art music tradition forms a natural part of his background, but his deepest inspiration is drawn from Eastern Orthodox mysticism and the Byzantine chant tradition.

Zivkovic achieved his international breakthrough in 2014, when the orchestral work On the Guarding of the Heart was awarded the Grawemeyer Award, one of the world’s most prestigious music prizes. In 2019, he also received the distinguished Swedish Lilla Christ Johnson Prize for his cello concerto Unceasing Prayers. Since then, his music has been performed by orchestras such as the New York Philharmonic and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra.

Read the interview with Djuro Zivkovic in Lyssna magazine (in Swedish)