About

The Vilnius String Quartet has long been presenting various concert series, and for the past few years has been performing the concert series Open the Gate of Oblivion, in which the audience is introduced to rarely performed works by various composers.

Composer and pianist Vytautas Bacevičius, whose 120th birthday we celebrate this year, was an exceptional figure in Lithuanian music history, one of the first avant-gardists who called for the creation of a modern Lithuania in the interwar period. He was known as a radical modernist who did not compromise with public taste and promoted the latest trends of Western European music. After settling in New York in 1940, he composed more moderate music in the 1940s and 1950s, referring to this as his ‘compromise period.’ String Quartet No. 3, Op. 48, composed in 1950, can be attributed to this period.

The renowned Lithuanian composer, pianist, influential music critic, and publicist Vladas Jakubėnas received an excellent musical education at the Riga Conservatory and the Berlin Academy of Music. It was while studying in Berlin in 1930 that he composed the String Quartet in A minor, which is featured in today’s programme. The composer wrote: “The two-movement String quartet shows even more modern tendencies; the themes have national characteristics; their style can be described as partly non-diatonic, partly modal (based on archaic tonalities).” This opus was then performed several times in the hall of the Berlin Academy of Music and received positive reviews in the press: “A work full of life, grown from the national music soil, full of blood and musicality.”

Czech composer Antonín Dvořák spent three years (1892–1895) in the United States as director of the National Conservatory in New York. In 1893, along with his most famous Symphony No. 9, From the New World, the composer wrote another masterpiece, this time in the chamber genre: String quartet No. 12 in F major, Op. 96, known as the American. The composer was fascinated by the music of Native Americans and African Americans. This Quartet projects these new colours woven into the composer’s characteristic rich and complex texture.