Balys Dvarionas

Balys Dvarionas (b Liepāja, Latvia, 19 June 1904; d Vilnius, 23 Aug 1972). Lithuanian composer, pianist and conductor.

The youngest child in a family of 11 children, he first studied music with his father, an organist and instrument maker. Serious study began under Alfrēds Kalniņš, and in 1920, along with several other Lithuanian musicians including Jadvyga Čiurlionytė and Juozas Gruodis, he entered the Leipzig Conservatory, where he studied with Teichmüller and Karg-Elert. He made his début as a pianist while still a student at Leipzig, with programmes featuring works by Debussy, Skryabin, Prokofiev, Čiurlionis and Gruodis. After graduating in 1924, he went on to Berlin in 1925 to take a postgraduate piano course under Egon Petri, before settling in Lithuania in 1926. He later made appearances as a pianist in Moscow and Leningrad (1933), Paris (1935), Stockholm (1936), Hamburg and elsewhere.

In 1926 Dvarionas took up a teaching post at the Kaunas Music School (later renamed the Kaunas Conservatory), which he held until his death. It was at this institution that he began his conducting career, directing student ensembles. He conducted in Berlin in 1932, studied with Walter and Karajan at the Salzburg Mozarteum in 1934, and in 1936 directed the first Lithuanian performance of Shostakovich’s First Symphony and the première of Čiurlionis’s The Sea. He took a diploma in conducting under Abendroth in Leipzig in 1939. In January 1940 he conducted the Lithuanian SO in their first concert, which featured Čiurlionis’s In the Forest. After the war he moved to Vilnius, the new Lithuanian capital, with his wife, the pianist A. Smilgaite, and their two children. There he continued to conduct and to teach in the newly unified conservatory.

Dvarionas wrote many of his most important compositions during the period immediately after the war. Works such as the Violin Concerto are notable for their combination of a folk-inspired lyricism with structural confidence and developmental coherence. His output is essentially conservative in tone, and as such it found favour with the Soviet authorities. He composed the Lithuanian national anthem, and in 1964 received the Order of Lenin and was made a People’s Artist of the USSR. His daughter Margarita Dvarionaitė (b 1928) studied in Leningrad and became conductor of the Lithuanian PO and Opera.