Onutė Narbutaitė is one of the few contemporary Lithuanian composers whose music is uniquely personal and is recognisable from the first bars of each piece. In addition to a wide range of emotional states, a sense of aristocratic restraint and strong compositional discipline are present in Narbutaitė’s music, which only adds to the emotional impact of this music.

The Ostrobothnia Chamber Orchestra (Finland) commissioned Narbutaitė to write a new piece, Otro río (The Other River, 2022), to celebrate the Orchestra’s 50th anniversary. The opus is dedicated to the Orchestra and conductor Juha Kang.

“It is very difficult to define this music by naming it. The metaphor of the “river”, which has a rich and deep connotative history, is in a way related to another of my opuses, krantas upė simfonija (riverbank-river symphony, 2007). Now is the other time of mine, the other time of the world, and therefore it is “the other river”, which appears here as a fragment of a line from Jorge Luis Borges’ poem Arte poética: “y recordar que el tiempo es otro río / saber que nos perdemos como el río / y que los rostros pasan como el agua.” (and remember Time is another river. / To know we stray like a river / and our faces vanish like water). The real time of the world is constantly pulsing. It can refocus our gaze and change our perceptions. On the day I put the last markings in the completed score, a brutal war, caused by aggressive criminals, broke out right next door. And even silence sounds very different now.” (Onutė Narbutaitė, Vilnius, 10 03 2022)

The opus is performed by the Lithuanian Chamber Orchestra under the baton of Belgian conductor and composer Benjamin Haemhouts, the artistic director of the Belgian orchestra Casco Phil.