Last Pagan Rites

Printed scores:
Vilnius: Vaga, 1984
Vilnius: Music Information Centre Lithuania, LMIC 108, 2018

Released recordings:
LP Melodiya C10-18773-4 (Anniversary Concert series), 1983
LP Harmonia Mundi CM 438X5
CD 33 Records 33CD006, 1997
CD Ondine ODE 972-2, 2001
LP Bronius Kutavičius. Last Pagan Rites. From the Yotvingian Stone. - Music Information Centre Lithuania, MICL LP 002, 2019

Last Pagan Rites - the most famous of Bronius Kutavičius’s oratorios; as it is evident from the title, its idea and form possess an inherent ritual character. The opening horn fanfare is followed by four sections which reveal a pagan world view: Oh You Green Grasshopper; Celebration of Medvėgalis (a sacred hill); Incantation of the Serpent and Celebration of the Oak-tree, the last being gradually overpowered by the final organ chorale. If we remember the crucial change of world view that Christianity brought to Lithuania in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries (although the sacred oak woods survived till much later), then this oratorio qualifies as a piece of programmatic music. Symbolism and ritual are amplified by something what seems to arise naturally from the music - the choir’s movement around the audience. The performers as a mobile source of sound seem to enframe the listeners within a sacred space and almost makes them participants themselves; the performers are also “enframed” by endless repetitions of motifs and canons that link up the two opposites - the dynamic and the static.

Rūta Gaidamavičiūtė