{"id":5286,"date":"2026-06-25T15:37:56","date_gmt":"2026-06-25T13:37:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.castellodipostignano.it\/artisti\/darko-brlek\/"},"modified":"2026-09-04T13:41:17","modified_gmt":"2026-09-04T11:41:17","slug":"darko-brlek","status":"publish","type":"artisti","link":"https:\/\/www.castellodipostignano.it\/en\/artists\/darko-brlek\/","title":{"rendered":"Darko Brlek"},"content":{"rendered":"

Darko Brlek is General and Artistic Director of the Ljubljana Festival, Slovenia’s leading international cultural festival. In 1991, he became the youngest director in the history of the Slovenian National Theatre, Opera and Ballet in Ljubljana. A year later, he was appointed artistic director of the Ljubljana Festival, and in 1995 he assumed full executive leadership of the institution.
Alongside his long tenure at the Festival, he has held numerous positions in Slovenian cultural life. He was among the founders of the Slovenian Chamber of Culture and served as president of the Government Council for Culture of the Republic of Slovenia. He is currently president of the Council of Experts of the Slovenian National Theatre in Maribor.
Active internationally, Brlek joined the Board of the European Festivals Association (EFA) in 1995. After serving as vice-president from 1997, he was president of the EFA from 2005 to 2017, and currently holds the title of honorary member. He is also president of the Festival Academy, an EFA initiative dedicated to training young festival managers.
In 2016, Darko was one of two winners of the annual Business Management Award, presented by the newspaper Finance and the Ljubljana Faculty of Economics for outstanding economic achievement. He has received numerous other awards, including the Bettett Award for Artistic Achievement and the \u017dupan\u010di\u010d Award, the highest honour given by the City of Ljubljana for excellence in arts and culture.
On 4 July 2018, he was awarded the Order of Merit by the President of the Republic of Slovenia for his contribution to Slovenian culture and for enhancing the international profile of cultural and artistic events. In 2020, he was nominated for the honorary title of Personality of the Year by the newspaper Delo , and in November 2021 he received the honorary title of Congress Ambassador of Slovenia for scientific and professional events.
Alongside his managerial career, Darko Brlek maintains an active career as a clarinettist. Throughout his musical life he has performed with distinguished artists such as Uto Ughi, Yuri Bashmet, Aleksander Rudin, Lyubov Timofeyeva, Kirill Rodin, Elena Bayeva, the Debussy Quartet, the Quartetto di Venezia, the Bart\u00f3k Quartet, the Kod\u00e1ly Quartet, the Tartini Quartetto Veneto, the Virtuosi Italiani, Musica Viva, the Solisti Aquilani, the Mannheim Chamber Orchestra, the Moscow Soloists, the Glinka Capella of St Petersburg, the Slovenian Philharmonic Orchestra, the Thailand Philharmonic Orchestra, the Lithuanian National Symphony Orchestra, the Slovenian RTV Symphony Orchestra, the Cameristi della Scala, the Deutsche Kammerakademie Frankfurt, Sinfonia Toronto, the Kazakhstan State Symphony Orchestra, the Qingdao Symphony Orchestra, the Shenzhen Symphony Orchestra, and the Hangzhou Symphony Orchestra, among many other international ensembles. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":8257,"template":"","class_list":["post-5286","artisti","type-artisti","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.castellodipostignano.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artisti\/5286","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.castellodipostignano.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artisti"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.castellodipostignano.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/artisti"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.castellodipostignano.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8257"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.castellodipostignano.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5286"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}