THE PIECE MAY NOT BE PERFORMED IN PUBLIC UNTIL 16 FEBRUARY, 2025! With a Birdsong by Algirdas Martinaitis (2024) is a piece for violin solo specially commissioned for the VII International Jascha Heifetz Competition for Violinists 2025.

Algirdas Martinaitis is a true type of a romantic creator also in his heart, and remains being such in spite of his recent digressions. Back in the late 70's, when he made his debut together with the like-minded composers of 'neo-romantic' generation, his nature-inspired chamber compositions were distinguished for their exceptional poetic sensibility and deep emotional impact. Another cycle of chamber works followed in the beginning of 90'ies, called The Book of the Beginning and the End. The images of evil, bestiality and the Last Judgement replaced a sad beauty of withering trees, drying rivers and vanishing birds. In his recent works, the composer consistently provokes reflection on the boundaries of authorship, opposing the categories of individuality and originality with allusions to banality, mimicry, and repetition.

A. Martinaitis (b. 1950) studied composition at the Lithuanian Academy of Music with prof. Eduardas Balsys, from which he graduated in 1978. He was among the first Lithuanian composers to receive the highest national artistic distinction, the Lithuanian National Prize for Culture and Arts, in 1989. His music is heard regularly at new music festivals in Lithuania and abroad, including Baltic Music Festival in Stokholm (1992), Vale of Glamorgan Festival (1996), Probaltica'97, MaerzMusik (2003, Germany), ISCM World Music Days (2008).

Having made a name for himself with his early chamber pieces, A. Martinaitis came to be known as a composer of poignantly introspective and nostalgic music, often fraught with impulsive, poetic character. The composer speaks in meditative undertones, charged with expression and tranquility, with subtle and pithy intonations combining active rhythms and asymmetric sound structures.

A. Martinaitis often speaks with irony of the strive for technical mastery and absolutism of the composer's craft, and calls his creative method "non-systematic" music or "writing by hand". His "technique" enables him to synthesize extremely diversified material: sound world inherent in the Lithuanian folk music, personal impressions of the oriental cultures, theatrical gestures, and "documentary" fragments of musique concrete. According to the composer, the synergy of verbal, musical and visual mediums, with recognizable rhetorical figures acting as unifying agents, are especially important in his music. In the pieces of the past decade, Algirdas Martinaitis has followed a new path by inviting the music from the past with which he feels spiritual affinity, rethinking and commenting on the works of his favorite composers. (Music Information Centre Lithuania).

More information and list of works: https://www.mic.lt/en/database/classical/composers/martinaitis/#works