Quartet add another string to their bow

The Vilnius string quartet are coming to Ireland this week to showcase themusic of Lithuania. Michael Dervan reports.

It doesn't take long to find links to Ireland in Vilnius. Advertising banners stretch across the Lithuanian capital's streets to announce airBaltic's new route to Dublin. "Model Ireland?" asks a headline in the City Paper, an English-language guide to what's on in the Baltic capitals, promoting a sober interview about the economic boom with Ireland's ambassador to Estonia and Moldova. Lithuania has also had its political scandals: its president, Rolandas Paksas, was removed from office in April after being accused of links to organised crime. And there's no other European state that so closely matches Ireland in terms of size (the Republic covers 70,000 square kilometres, Lithuania 65,000), population (four million and 3.6 million) and religious background (88 per cent Roman Catholic and 72 per cent).

There's also, of course, a history of occupation by a foreign power. The prominent symbols of Soviet rule have been thoroughly removed from Lithuania. Vilnius's main shopping street is now named after the powerful 14th-century grand duke Gediminas rather than after Lenin, and the shopfronts and brand names are those you might expect to see in any European capital. You have to go to the theme park created in Grutas, 120 kilometres south-west of Vilnius, by a mushroom magnate called Viliumas Malinauskas to see the sort of statues that used to feature in the public spaces of Soviet-era Lithuania.

Malinauskas, a former wrestling champion, stirred up a storm of Michael O'Leary-style publicity with a venture that he calls Soviet Sculpture Garden at Grutas Park but has been nicknamed Stalin World. It's near the spa town of Druskininkai, which, in the years before Lithuanian independence, in 1991, attracted large numbers from Russia and other parts of the Soviet Union.

In the broader sense, however, the Soviet legacy is not at all hard to detect. The crumbling buildings so typical of the Soviet Union have not yet all been spruced up, and some of the wooden houses have been so poorly maintained in the face of the weather that they transport the traveller momentarily in to a pre-industrial age. Dotted around the countryside you'll also find decaying clusters of buildings, deserted relics that were once the busy hubs of collectivised farming.

It's the time of year when storks visit the Baltic countries to breed. They perch their large nests, watchtower-like, mostly on telegraph poles but, occasionally, on a chimney or a bare, pointed tree. The fields they survey are without fences, hedges or ditches. During the day they can still see the soil being turned by men guiding horse-drawn ploughs and, towards evening, the isolated, tethered cows being milked by hand in to pails.

Modern agricultural machinery can be seen at work, too; one of the more unusual sights I witness in the Lithuanian countryside, close to the border with Belarus, is the machine ploughing of a field that has attracted two dozen storks to forage in the upturned earth. In a country with an average monthly wage of about €330, however, the disparity of prosperity between city folk and country dwellers is consistently striking.

The Baltic states' interest in Ireland stems from a desire to see the region's high growth rates and business-friendly taxation systems replicate the transformations of the Celtic Tiger rather than confirm the predictions of the Economist Intelligence Unit, which has estimated that it will take Lithuania 53 years to fall in to line with EU living standards.

But when it comes to music and music-making Lithuania has little to be shy about, even if it hasn't yet produced a figure to match the prominence of Estonia's Arvo Pärt or Latvia's Peteris Vasks.

What you might call professional composition is traced back scarcely more than 100 years, to the work of Mikolajus Konstantinas Ciurlionis (1875-1911). Internationally, Ciurlionis, who wrote a large number of piano miniatures, is far less well known than Ireland's John Field. But in his native land he is such a celebrated figure that nearly every town seems to have a Ciurlionis Street. Ciurlionis gave Lithuania its first orchestral work of note, the symphonic poem In The Forest, in 1901, and he led a double career, leaving some 300 paintings that mirror the diverse influences and tendencies of his music. It seems entirely appropriate that as part of their contribution to this year's West Cork Chamber Music Festival the Vilnius Quartet will give Irish concert-goers a rare opportunity to hear the three surviving movements of Ciurlionis's String Quartet in C minor.

The Vilnius Quartet itself was founded in 1965, when its four original members were students. They played for love of music, not for money, according to its founding member and leader, Audrone Vainiunaite, as there wasn't really any money around to support it. Things changed for the better in 1972, when the quartet took the top prize at an international string-quartet competition in Liège. Its international career took off, the following year it was granted the name of Vilnius Quartet and in 1979 it received the Lithuanian State Prize.

Vainiunaite, daughter of the composer Stasys Vainiunas, has been with the quartet from the start, though the member of second-longest standing, cellist Augustinas Vasiliauskas, recalls that when the quartet was founded he was still serving in the Soviet army. The other members, second violinist Arturas Silale (not yet born in 1965) and viola player Girdutis Jakaitis (still in nappies when the quartet was formed) joined in the 1990s. Changes of membership are a difficult fact of life for string quartets, and the Vilnius players joke about the arrival of a new member being like a kind of surgery, as fraught and unpredictable as an organ transplant. If the body doesn't actually reject the new arrival, they say, the main difficulty has been overcome.

The quartet's repertoire is large, running to some 450 works. The players describe themselves as having been attracted by the nature and special intimacy of the medium, as well as by the unusually high quality of the repertoire, which, they feel, seems to bring out the very best in the very best composers.

Their appetite for work seems endless. They've performed complete cycles of Haydn's and Beethoven's quartets, and they marked their country's accession to the European Union with a series of 15 concerts in 2002 and 2003, celebrating chamber music of EU countries. Here they offered complete evenings of works from each EU country, with all the programming challenges that created for smaller territories such as Portugal, Luxembourg and, indeed, Ireland - their Irish programme included works by Brian Boydell, Philip Hammond and Jane O'Leary.

The day I meet them, in their rehearsal room at the Lithuanian National Philharmonic, their employer, the music on the stands is a quartet by Walter Braunfels, whose Prinzessin Brambilla will be heard later this year at Wexford Festival Opera.

As you might expect for a quartet formed in the Soviet Union of the 1960s, the group's members trained in Moscow, although Vainiunaite makes the point that in those days the Russian style was excessively hung up about technique. Masterclasses in Budapest helped broaden their outlook, and they absorbed new ideas from the concert experiences that were opened up by their international touring.

These days, she says, young Lithuanian musicians are less likely to be found in Moscow, because many of the city's best teachers have relocated to centres elsewhere in Europe.

Talking to the members of the quartet through an interpreter is slightly disorienting. Many of the questions provoke lively four-way discussions that seem to be summarised in to implausibly short and clean conclusions. By contrast, when speaking to the composer Onute Narbutaite, whose Second String Quartet, Open The Gate Of Oblivion, will be played in Bantry by the Vilnius Quartet,the fully translated replies seem somehow oblique even when full of detail.

For Narbutaite, who was born in 1956 and grew up in a Lithuania that had been absorbed in to the Soviet Union, composition was "a way to create an island of freedom in myself". She wasn't thinking, as she imagines she might have done had she been born in the West, of career path and achievements. "For me and some of my colleagues it was vice versa: we could hide ourselves, go inside from the reality that was around us."

The minimalistic spareness of manner they adopted upset some of the older generation of Lithuanian composers, even to the point of stirring up a debate about whether what they were writing could be called music.

She fights shy when I ask about any specific influences (although later the names of Webern and Bach leak out), and she has both a horror of cliché and a high regard for individuality of voice. To start writing she needs to be able to see the form of the composition as a whole. And, she agrees, music is probably more abstract than personally expressive for her, even though in the large, abstract pictures she needs in order to get started there are always "some small emotional inspirations inside".

The title Open The Gate Of Oblivion is "a paraphrase of Paul Celan", whose poetry she was reading at the time of composition, in 1980. "He likes this metaphor, although he would never formulate it in that way."

The titles usually come only after a work has been completed, and she feels that they should offer "some colour and atmosphere of the work". Although a number of her titles suggest a dark view of the world, she doesn't see her music as pessimistic (nor as optimistic or even neutral), although she acknowledges the presence of sadness and a sense of tragedy.

Whether or not it's still in the pursuit of privacy and escape, it's the activity of composition that gives her most pleasure, even above the pleasure of listening to the work itself. The most difficult stages are getting started and, when finished, the depression of having to wait to hear the new piece.

Irish audiences don't have long to wait for an introduction to music and musicians from Lithuania. The Vilnius Quartet play works by Narbutaite and Ciurlionis (and also Vasks, Pärt and Janácek) at West Cork Chamber Music Festival at the weekend.