Dracula

At the Grand Hall of Kaunas State Philharmonic

The traditional autumn event, the contemporary music festival „Iš Arti“, presents six events from November 10 to 21, exploring the field of contemporary music—from reflections on the modernist tradition to new stage forms—and offering listeners an experience of its diverse world.

The centrepiece of the festival’s opening concert on November 17 is American composer Philip Glass’s suite „Dracula“, written for cello octet and piano. At this concert, „Cello Club“ will perform in this formation for the first time: the ensemble, now expanded to an octet, will play with pianist Indrė Baikštytė. This version for cello octet and piano was created by Michael Riesman, Philip Glass’s longtime collaborator, pianist and conductor.

The work creates a slow, hypnotic soundscape—a pulsing, layered structure whose drama unfolds through slowly changing, varied repetitions. It originated at the end of the 20th century, when „Universal Pictures“ invited Glass to compose a new soundtrack for Tod Browning’s 1931 classic film „Dracula“. Since the film’s original version contained almost no music, the composer chose a string quartet: a chamber ensemble that could create both an intimate and a tense emotional atmosphere while avoiding direct genre clichés. The music was first performed in collaboration with the legendary „Kronos Quartet“.

Alongside Glass’s music, the programme will feature works by Lithuanian composers Justė Janulytė and Rytis Mažulis—two different compositions connected to the tradition of minimalism. In Janulytė’s „Unanime“, the cello octet is conceived as a single organism: a unified, breathing body of sound in which individual lines dissolve into a shared flow of timbre. Mažulis’s „Circulatio“, by contrast, is based on cyclical motion—repetition, rotation and a precisely organised process that takes on a living, pulsing form in performance. In their own ways, both works extend the same idea of music as a constantly changing system that develops in the flow of time.

Organiser: VšĮ „Iš Arti“
Project funded by the Lithuanian Council for Culture
Main partner: Kaunas State Philharmonic
Media partner: LRT Klasika