VYTAUTAS STRAIŽYS — FULL BIOGRAPHY

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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.
