Predrag Gosta

Predrag Gosta (Cyrillic: Предраг Госта) is a Serbian-American conductor, harpsichordist, and baritone.

Life and career Predrag Gosta was born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia (present day Serbia), on 14 January 1972. His father was born to Serbian and German parents in Vojvodina and his mother to a large Croatian family in Herzegovina.

He studied at the Belgrade Music Academy, London's Trinity College of Music, Georgia State University in Atlanta (USA), as well as the University of Oxford.

He is the artistic director of an early music ensemble and baroque orchestra New Trinity Baroque, and the music director and conductor of the Gwinnett Ballet Theatre based in Atlanta, United States; the president of the international early music society Early Music Network. From 1991 to 1996 he was the artistic director of the Studio for Early Music Belgrade and the Belgrade International Early Music Festival. Since the festival's renewal in 2012 Maestro Gosta has been serving again as its artistic director. The Festival has since grown to one of the largest and most successful early music festivals in southern Europe - in 2017 it received an Award from the classical music magazine Muzika klasika as the best festival for classical music in Serbia, while Maestro Gosta received the Artist of the Year award from the Association of Musical Artists. Predrag Gosta is also the artistic director of the Belgrade Baroque Academy, which he founded in 2013 and co-directed until 2019 with Serbian-born contralto Marijana Mijanović.

Between 2008 and 2009 he was the assistant conductor of the National Philharmonic in Washington, D.C. Since 2010 he is the president of the Makris Foundation in Washington, D.C., and the Makris Music Society. He is also an artistic advisor and U.S. director of Peter the Great Music Academy in St. Petersburg, Russia. In 2014 Gosta established the New Belgrade Opera, which is focused on baroque opera. In 2015 he became the music director of the New Symphony Orchestra of Belgrade, which now bears the name of the Greek-American composer Andreas Makris and is now known as the Makris Symphony Orchestra. In 2019, under this orchestra, he founded a new international competition for conductors, where he acts as the president of the jury.

Predrag Gosta has recorded several critically acclaimed CDs, including recording of Henry Purcell's opera Dido and Aeneas with British soprano Evelyn Tubb, and recording of Rachmaninoff's Symphonic Dances and Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition with the London Symphony Orchestra. Other musicians he collaborated with include baroque violinists Florian Deuter, Ilia Korol and John Holloway, Baroque harpist Andrew Lawrence-King, lutenists Anthony Rooley and Michael Fields, Dutch recorder virtuoso Marion Verbruggen, harpsichordists Steven Devine and Ottaviano Tenerani, Italian countertenor Carlo Vistoli, Serbian contralto Marijana Mijanovic, Polish mezzo-soprano Magdalena Wór and others, as well as orchestras and theatre houses such as the London Symphony Orchestra, the Russian National Orchestra in Moscow, the State Hermitage Orchestra in St. Petersburg, the St. Petersburg State Capella Glinka, the Belgrade Philharmonic Orchestra, the Theatre of Biel-Solothurn Theatre, the Belgrade National Theatre and the Madlenianum Opera-Theatre, opera theatres in Ruse, Burgas and Stara Zagora (Bulgaria) and others. He appeared at the festivals such as the Boston Early Music Festival and Piccolo Spoleto (USA), Varazdin Baroque Evenings and Korkyra Baroque (Croatia), Budva Theatre City (Montenegro) and many others.

Predrag Gosta also served the affiliate guest lecturer at Georgia State University in Atlanta, and as a choir professor and artist-in-residence at Oxford College of Emory University in Oxford, Georgia, USA.

Discography and videography