About

Vytautas Straižys sat down at the piano at the age of seven and won his first international competition at nine, in Jūrmala; its final was the first time he played with an orchestra. From the age of eleven he performed with the Lithuanian Chamber Orchestra — some twenty concerts during his childhood — and in January 2001 an appearance with the orchestra under Saulius Sondeckis was broadcast on Lithuanian national television.

Jazz was in the family before it was in him. His grandfather, Jonas Cijūnėlis, was a multi-instrumentalist and arranger, and one of the foremost leaders of the Lithuanian Radio and Television Light Music Orchestra. He also led the ensemble Nemuno žiburiai, whose musicians he taught to play in the swing manner; his name belongs to the beginnings of jazz culture in Lithuania.

Twelve years at the National M. K. Čiurlionis School of Arts were spent in the classical repertoire, while jazz arrived when he was nine, first through recordings by Bill Evans, Chick Corea and Miles Davis. After school he chose the second path and continued his studies in jazz piano and improvisation in the Netherlands, at the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague and at Codarts in Rotterdam. In 2007 he took the Grand Prix at Jazz Improvizacija, the region’s competition for jazz pianists — the most significant of several international competition wins.

He has spent close to half his life abroad. For five years he played piano on cruise ships, sailing the Mediterranean, the Baltic, the Norwegian Sea and the Atlantic, and going ashore in New York and Cuba. In the Netherlands he performed and taught. He returned to Vilnius with a repertoire in which the classical tradition and jazz improvisation are not two separate things.

In 2019 the voice joined the piano, and since then Straižys both plays and sings in concert. A distinct part of his repertoire is the American Songbook — more than six hundred songs drawn from Nat King Cole, Frank Sinatra, Johnny Hartman and others. He commands both the traditional jazz piano language and the singing manner of Sinatra and Tony Bennett, a pairing rarely held by one performer.

The arrangements are made on stage. Straižys does not write them down in advance — pop, soul and rock songs are rebuilt during the concert, together with whoever is playing that evening, without regard for stylistic boundaries. His improvisations move from the textures of Scriabin and Rachmaninoff through Debussy to atonality, so the same song is never played the same way twice.

The music of Bill Evans is among his central specialisations. He has presented a full solo Evans programme at festivals more than once, among them the Kristupas Festival in the Bernardine Garden in Vilnius; separately he plays the same music in a quartet with Deimantas Balys, Aliaksei Kryshtal and Jonas Filmanavičius. Over the past decade he has appeared in numerous projects alongside the veterans of Lithuanian jazz — Leonardas Pilkauskas, Karolis Šarkus, Mindaugas Vadoklis, Rokas Jaunius and Augustas Baronas. Viktorija Gečytė, Kotryna Juodzevičiūtė, Eivilė Miceikaitė, Eglė Petrošiūtė, Godo Yorke and Marija Arutiunova have sung alongside him in duo, and two sold-out concerts with Gabrielius Vagelis were given at St. Catherine’s Church.

His own programmes include “Legendary Film Melodies”, which regularly sells out St. Catherine’s Church in Vilnius, and “007: Songs from the James Bond Films” with the soprano Marija Arutiunova, in which the harmony of the Bond songs is rewritten into a wide, late-Romantic texture. His harmonisation of the folk song “Vai nekukuok” was recorded in 2013 on Rugilė Daujotaitė’s collection “Three Lithuanian Folk Songs”. In the summer of 2026 he appeared at the VilkiJAZZ festival in duo with Godo Yorke.

In the summer of 2023, in the Tower quarter of Vilnius, Straižys began giving concerts in his own home; more than eighty were held over two years. In November 2025 this grew into the Downtown Piano Lab music club, where 43 professional concerts in the first six months drew close to three thousand listeners. As artistic director he curates the entire programme, arranges the sung repertoire and oversees the debuts of young performers.

Straižys has taught piano since 2007, and his students today join from Australia, the United Kingdom, Denmark, Sweden, Switzerland and the United States. He has been a guest on LRT Klasika, LRT Radio and Lithuanian national television many times since 2016, and in 2024 an entire episode of the television programme “Nepaprasti žmonės” was devoted to him. He has received letters of commendation from the President of the Republic of Lithuania and from the Prime Minister on several occasions, for representing the country abroad and for his work as an artist.