This year, composer Onutė Narbutaitė, a recipient of the Lithuanian National Culture and Arts Prize, is celebrating a distinguished anniversary. The Pažaislis Music Festival, in collaboration with the Kaunas State Philharmonic, invites audiences to a festive and sacred concert dedicated to the composer’s anniversary. On August 13, at the Kaunas Basilica of the Resurrection of Christ, the Kaunas State Choir and the Kaunas City Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Robertas Šervenikas, will perform O. Narbutaitė’s majestic and spiritual work “Tres Dei Matris Symphoniae” (Three Symphonies of the Mother of God).

O. Narbutaitė, a student of Bronius Kutavičius and Julius Juzeliūnas, has had her works performed not only in Lithuania but also in many European countries, the United States, Canada, South Korea, and Japan. Among the commissioners of her works are the Helsinki Festival, the Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival, the “Warsaw Autumn” Festival, the Brandenburg State Orchestra in Frankfurt, the Louth Contemporary Music Society (Ireland), and others.
According to musicologists, “O. Narbutaitė is one of the few contemporary composers whose music bears the mark of exceptional individuality and is recognizable from the very first bars of each piece. Alongside a broad spectrum of emotional states and sensations, a sense of aristocratic restraint and strong compositional discipline is evident throughout her work—this only intensifies the emotional impact of her music. […] Perhaps the American musicologist Richard Taruskin comes closest to the most accurate description of her current work when he says: not “tonal.” Not “romantic.” Not “retro.” “Consonant.”

Here is how the composer herself describes the work, written in 2003: “The three movements—Angelus Domini, Bethlehem, and Mater Dolorosa—depict three key moments in Mary’s life connected to Christ: the Annunciation, the Nativity, and the Crucifixion. It is no coincidence that I used the word ‘symphony’ in the title—I wrote a symphony, not an oratorio. The choir’s role here is considerably more modest than that of the orchestra, though still very important: it comes to the fore only in the brief a cappella introduction (Introitus), at the end (Oratio), and in the third movement, written to the traditional Stabat Mater text.