Vita Mavrič

Vita Mavrič is a Slovenian chanson singer and actress, born on 18 October 1965 in Celje. For more than three decades she has been the leading voice of the Slovenian chanson, singing mostly in Slovenian, from the songs of Frane Milčinski Ježek to her own versions of Aznavour, Brecht and Weill.

She started on the stage of the Ljubljana City Theatre in 1987, in the title role of the musical U "Slovenačkim gorama" by Žarko Petan, Ervin Fritz and Urban Koder. The same year she recorded a television recital of Urban Koder's music to poems by Slovenian poets, Pesem je ženska, and released her first cassette. After a concert of Koder's songs at Cankarjev dom in 1988 she devoted herself to the chanson for good.

Her breakthrough came in 1992 with Ne smejte se, umrl je klovn, a music theatre evening of Ježek's chansons that won her the Župančič award. She then opened Café Teater in Ljubljana, which she has run as artistic director since 1994, and for fifteen years she led the chanson festival La vie en rose, closing its last evening at Cankarjev dom in 2015. In the 1990 Serbian film Bel epok she played the female lead and won the ibis award at the first Film Festival of Serbia when the film was finally premiered 17 years later.

Her biggest project was the stage show Nekoč bili smo v maju, directed by Matjaž Pograjc and dedicated to her long-time pianist Borut Lesjak, with music and arrangements by Mojmir Sepe; with it came the album Sem, kakršna sem (1998), a Viktor for special achievement and three Zlati petelin awards. In 2000 she received the Ježek award for her whole body of work. Hrepenenja (2001) gathered chansons by Brecht and Weill, Mandeljni in rozine (2007) Jewish klezmer songs, and in 2015 she recorded Vitomil Zupan's Šlagerji in pesmi iz zapora with Jani Kovačič.

In 2017, marking thirty years on stage, she released Sprehod and said goodbye to the big stage with a sold-out concert in the Gallus Hall of Cankarjev dom, choosing to sing only intimate chanson evenings from then on. Two tribute albums followed: Nokturno žlahtnih duš (2020), devoted to the songs of Arsen Dedić, and Kontra-Alba (2022), devoted to the work of Jani Kovačič.