Cenotaph

In remembrance of the post-war resistance against the Soviet regime (1944-1953)

The premiere of the piece, played by the Vilnius New Music Ensemble, took place in 1995 at the South Bank Centre Queen Elisabeth Hall in London.
“It was my intention”, the composer Šarūnas Nakas said, “to offer a symbolic sign of remembrance to those about thirty thousand men and women who fought in the woods for the nation’s liberty for almost a decade after the end of the World War Two, the fiftieth anniversary of which we were marking back then. In Lithuania, the war was far from over, something Western Europe is barely aware of.” Our “woods are like cenotaphs”, the empty symbolic graves, according to the Lithuanian poet Vytautas Bložė. In this piece, the music conveys that particular idea through the dramatic yet condensed means.
The version for instrumental ensemble has been played at the Prague Spring Festival and at numerous concerts in Vilnius, Klaipėda and other Lithuanian cities. In 2006, at the request of the Vienna-based Die Reihe Ensemble, the piece was rearranged for piano trio, the version that has since proved the most popular among performers.