Nadja Grdinić – Classical Guitarist
Nadja Grdinić comes from Kolašin, a small mountain town in northern Montenegro, and today studies at the Universität Mozarteum in Salzburg. The distance between those two places says something about a career that has been built step by step rather than announced with a single prize.
Beginnings in Montenegro
Her route to the instrument was not a plan. It began, as she puts it, “quite spontaneously, through curiosity and play”. The first foundations were laid by her teacher Milena Vračarić; later, during her formative years of training, Dražen Joković became the decisive influence on her development.
Montenegro is a small country with a guitar scene that punches well above its weight, sustained by a network of festivals, competitions and music schools along the Adriatic coast and inland. Grdinić is one of several players to have emerged from it and moved on to the major European conservatories.
Studies in Salzburg
At the Mozarteum she works with Marco Tamayo, the Cuban guitarist whose class is one of the most sought-after in Europe and who is known for a technical school of unusual rigour.
Grdinić describes studying abroad as the point at which her understanding of music changed: the goal stopped being technical perfection alone and became the search for a personal artistic identity. That shift is audible in her playing — she is not a guitarist who reaches for effect, and her tempos are unhurried where a younger player might push.
Masterclasses at the Guitar Art Festival
She has taken part three times in Guitar integrations, a masterclass programme run alongside the Guitar Art Festival in Herceg Novi with the support of the Delegation of the European Union to Montenegro and the Europe House. In the most recent edition she studied with the Spanish guitarist Rafael Aguirre.
What she values in the format, by her own account, is not only the playing: masterclasses of this kind put a student in contact with the musical cultures the great names of the instrument come from — a perspective that a practice room cannot provide.
At Siccas Guitars
Grdinić has recorded for our channel more than once. In 2026 she played Cavatina by Stanley Myers — the theme from The Deer Hunter, and one of the melodies most closely bound up with the classical guitar since John Williams persuaded the composer to expand it into a guitar piece. She performed it on a 1994 guitar by Andrea Tacchi, the Florentine luthier known for instruments of exceptional refinement.
Cavatina is deceptive: nothing in it is hard to follow, but the long melodic line has to sing continuously above the accompaniment in the guitar's most exposed register, with nowhere to hide. Our article on her Cavatina recording looks at the performance in detail, and our piece on Cavatina itself traces the history of the melody.
She has also been heard on one of our own instruments, the Siccas Luthiers Creation Doubletop Triptych.
An unhurried career
Asked about her awards, Grdinić has said that the personal progress behind them means more to her than the recognitions themselves. It is a quietly unusual thing for a young player to say in a field organised almost entirely around competition results — and it fits a musician who seems in no rush to be finished. Nadja Grdinić is worth following.
Discover more players in our profiles of great classical guitarists.
