About

Vytautas Straižys sat down at the piano at the age of seven. Twelve years at the National M. K. Čiurlionis School of Arts were spent in the classical repertoire; at thirteen he appeared as a soloist with the Lithuanian Chamber Orchestra under Saulius Sondeckis, in a concert broadcast on Lithuanian national television. Jazz arrived when he was nine, first through recordings by Bill Evans, Chick Corea and Miles Davis. After school he chose the second path and continued his jazz studies in the Netherlands, at the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague and at Codarts in Rotterdam.

He has spent close to half his life abroad. For five years he played piano on cruise ships, living in a cabin of four square metres and going ashore in New York and Cuba. In the Netherlands he performed and taught. He returned to Vilnius with a repertoire in which the classical tradition and jazz improvisation are not two separate things.

In 2019 the voice joined the piano. Since then Straižys both plays and sings in concert, and the Vilnius jazz scene lists him under both names. His repertoire reaches from Rachmaninoff, Chopin and Debussy to Bill Evans and Oscar Peterson, from jazz standards to the sung classics.

One of his central specialisations is the music of Bill Evans. Straižys has presented a full solo Evans programme at festivals more than once, among them the Kristupas Festival in the Bernardine Garden in Vilnius; separately he plays the same music in a quartet with Deimantas Balys, Aliaksei Kryshtal and Jonas Filmanavičius.

He performs solo, in duo with singers and with ensembles, and has played more than twenty concerts with the Lithuanian Chamber Orchestra. Viktorija Gečytė, Kotryna Juodzevičiūtė, Eivilė Miceikaitė, Godo Yorke and Marija Arutiunova have sung with him. His harmonisation of the folk song “Vai nekukuok” was recorded in 2013 on Rugilė Daujotaitė’s collection “Three Lithuanian Folk Songs”.

In the summer of 2026 he appeared at the VilkiJAZZ festival in duo with Godo Yorke. He has been a guest on LRT Klasika and LRT Radio many times since 2016, and in 2024 an entire episode of the LRT television programme “Nepaprasti žmonės” was devoted to him.

In the summer of 2023, in the Tower quarter of Vilnius, he began giving concerts in his own home; more than eighty were held over two years. In November 2025 this grew into the Downtown Piano Lab music club. Straižys has taught piano since 2007, and his students today join from Australia, the United Kingdom, Denmark, Sweden, Switzerland and the United States.