Peter Katina is a Slovak accordionist focused mainly on contemporary music. He started playing accordion at the age of six. Already during his studies at the primary music school he won many prizes in accordion competitions. Since 1993 he studied at the Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava. The Ministry of Education of the Slovak Republic awarded him for excellent results in studies which he graduated with the V.C. praise certificate for excellent school performance in 1998.
He won several prizes at international competitions, he is a winner of Coupe Mondiale C.I.A. competition in 1996 and a laureate of competitions in Denmark, France and Switzerland. For his study results he won the Volksbank Grand Prix for excellent university graduates. After the graduation at the Academy in Bratislava Peter Katina studied at the Carl Nielsen Music Academy in Odense, Denmark, where he finished his studies specializing on contemporary music performance with brilliant study results under prof.Owen Murray in 2001. Later he continued in postgraduate studies at the Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava.
Already during his studies Peter Katina inclined to contemporary music performance and was the initiator of several accordion compositions both in Slovakia and abroad. He cooperated with composers as Per Nørgård, Toshio Hosokawa, Lars Graugaard, Magnar Åm, Shai Cohen, in Slovakia with Jozef Podprocký, Evgeny Irshai, Iris Szeghy, Peter Machajdík, Miroslav Tóth and many others. He also gave the first performance of concertos for accordion and orchestra by Igor Dibák, Joseph Kolkovich and Evgeny Irshai. Peter Katina gave concerts in Denmark, Great Britain, Germany, Poland, Hungary, Serbia and Czech Republic.
He appeared at festivals Poznań Music Spring, Arcus Temporum in Pannonhalma, Re:New in Copenhagen, Ny Musik i Birkerød, at festivals Melos-Étos, Konvergencie, ISCM New Music Days, Sound City Days, Hevhetia Summer Music Festival, Ars Nova and Konfrontácie. Peter Katina performed a concert project of the new Slovak accordion works entitled Recitals in Four Cities, he made a Central European tour with premiere works for accordion and electronics in 2018 and performed a premiere concert in 2019 with the number of new solo accordion works he commissioned. He cooperates with the DivadloViola in Prešov, where he regularly performs premiere concerts of solo and chamber music.Besides the solo projects he performs in a duo with his wife, pianist Janette Katinová Šingerová. His discography includes the albums Solo and Secrets, the recording Flashing with Scandinavian music, Preludes and Fugues Op.87 by Dmitri Shostakovich, accordion works by Jozef Podprocký and Evgeny Irshai and the album A Leap Into the Dark with new Israeli music.
In 2017 Peter Katina led an Accordion Masterclass at the Royal Academy of Music in London and gave a lecture at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest.
Besides his concert activities he is also active as a teacher at Conservatory of Jozef Adamovič in Košice. At the same time he also works as a music publicist, he is an author of a significant number of articles and reviews published in different music magazines. He worked as an external collaborator at the Slovak Radio, where he presented his own programs on classical music and jazz and he works as a lecturer of dramaturgy at the Košice State Philharmonic. Peter Katina also presented a three year public serie of popularizing lectures on music entitled MusicZoom:Unconventional talkshow about music. He is the autor of the book Hudba inak (Music in a Different Way).