Professors at the Masterclass

Raimondas Butvila/violin

Raimondas Butvila

Prominent Lithuanian violinist Raimondas Butvila was born in Šiauliai in 1956. From an early age he studied violin. For eleven years he studied at the famous M. K. Čiurlionis School of Arts in Vilnius, where K. Kristapavicius and Eugenijus Paulauskas (1927 - 2018) were his teachers. Paulauskas, one of the greatest violinists of Eastern Europe of the previous generation, a successor to the school of Leopold Auer, also trained Raimondas at the Vilnius Conservatory. During the years of study, Raimondas received many laureate prizes at competitions, the last of which was a diploma at the 1979 All-Union Competition. Later, Raimondas refined his artistry under the guidance of the eminent Valery Klimov at the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory post graduate studies. The twelve years after returning to Lithuania were for Raimondas years of hard work as a soloist, a performer of many new violin works, as a member of a string quartet in the Lithuanian National Quartet, as a claimed young teacher of the Vilnius Conservatory. In the last years of the Soviet regime, Raimondas helped create the second Vilnius Symphony Orchestra, becoming its first concertmaster.

Eighteen years between 1993 and 2011, Raimondas worked in Venezuela in the famous System of music education, where he directed the music college of Emilio Friedman in Caracas. In those years, Raimondas Butvila performed almost the entire central repertoire of violin concerts, soloing with various Venezuelan orchestras.

Returning to Lithuania, Professor Butvila headed the string department of the Vytautas Magnus University School of Music in Kaunas and continues to perform extensively.