Antanas Rekašius was an extraordinary person. When he was born, he was thrown out in rags, he barely survived, and apparently that first terrible stress of life imprinted in his personality an extraordinary lust for life and at the same time an open and bravura awareness of the border between death and life. He was a very strong and at the same time difficult to understand person. On the one hand, he lived an open, public, effective life, on the other hand, his personality is shrouded in some incomprehensible mystery. It was both open and extremely mysterious, just like his salon at home, always in twilight, with perpetually shuttered windows and state-of-the-art sound recording and playback equipment from which the exotic sounds of his music constantly emanated. It was only after many years of communication with Antans Rekašumi that I learned about his astrological abilities, his thinking about the other world. He was a strangely multifaceted man: irrepressible temper and pragmatism, cold mind and psychic belief in supernatural powers. He was extremely passionate, and one of his passions was music. But not the music that listeners and art functionaries imagined at the time. Music as a challenge, a provocation, a deliberate play with platitudes and constant pretense. Music as a mask, as a character in commedia della arte. It was an absolutely accurate picture of Anna's deceptive and false reality. Antanas Rekašius with his aleatoric style was perhaps the biggest Lithuanian challenge to the entire aesthetics of socialist realism. He constantly pointed his tongue at all official art, like those choristers who smiled at the audience with shiny golden teeth at the end of one of his works - the Soviet symbol of the good life. I have played several premieres by Rekašius and I will never forget how we together with the composer encrypted his unusual musical signs - arrows, dashes and worms. He didn't explain how to do it, he created it. The rehearsal was like a performance, an improvisation. Passion for creation. Maybe that's why Antanas Rekašius was the greatest creator of Lithuanian ballet. Image, movement, characters growing out of extraordinary dynamic movements, flickering of characteristic textures and continuous musical play.Rekašius was a composer who constantly doubted his work. He craved recognition and at the same time distrusted what he had created. He was constantly dissatisfied, he kept correcting his compositions, sometimes re-creating them, as if looking for confirmation of his own value and ideas in them. I had to experience the effect of Antanas Rekašius's works on the listener more than once, I had to present him for the first time in America, read many reviews about his music in the foreign press. An extraordinary success. His Third Quartet, which was in the permanent repertoire of the Vilnius Quartet, caused a real storm, laughter and ovation from the audience as programmed. This was probably the most vivid reaction I experienced while playing Lithuanian music.And now Antanas Rekašius is gone. No more, although, in fact, he retreated from us for five whole years, retreated into himself, into his secret, into his distrust, unable to withstand the changing times, conditions and indifference. Apparently, he no longer found internal arguments for a new challenge, a new fight, which is why it is so unfortunate, so painful. Ah, why didn't he want his last concert! Oh, that someone could explain to him what a wonderful, bright, colorful world he created, so that he would know that no one will ever be able to erase him from Lithuanian music. Antanas Rekašius was not afraid of death, he was completely manly, strong, the sand of Lithuania will cover him like that, but his music will never say goodbye.
