Marvellous Music from Lithuania

Recently the music of a composer previously unknown to me has left a deep and lasting impression. Together with my good friend Christopher Horner, I was in Wyastone hall, Monmouthshire  to record music by the Lithuanian composer Juozas Gruodis (1884-1948). This is music which is long forgotten outside his native country where his songs in particular are still regularly heard. 

The new recording features a collection of these songs transcribed for violin and piano and a suite of four pieces for violin and piano. The real discoveries for me however where the violin sonata and the second of his two piano sonatas - both works of great power and emotional depth. Gruodis lived through turbulent times as his country, which was under the of the Russian Empire at the turn 20th century, was re-established as a democratic state after the first World War, then occupied by both Soviet Union and Germany briefly during and after the second. Eventually absorbed once again into the Soviet Union until independence in the 1990s, it's no wonder that Gruodis was infuenced by native musical influences and is seen as a nationalist composer in the line of Bartok and Janacek. He did indeed collect folk song and absorbed its atmosphere into his mature music, but in both of the sonatas it is the Germanic influence of his studies in Leipzig which gives the music its cogency and fluidity. Gruodis was the first Lithuanian composer to write regularly for orchestra. Here is a late work - his Symphonic Variations. In due course I will post some of the new recording.