From apartment concerts to a club of our own

It started in the summer of 2023, when Vytautas Straižys began hosting house concerts in his apartment in the skyscraper quarter: a dozen or so chairs around a piano, musicians without a stage, and an audience close enough to hear every page turn. The first seasons brought more than eighty evenings. Eventually the room ran out of space.

In October 2025 the club moved to the third floor of the “Europa” Mall. Now it has a room of its own: a concert grand, a hundred and twenty seats or seventy at tables, with the stage lighting and Meyer Sound system installed by our partner SONUS. The format stayed the same — the audience close, the musician in plain sight.

Downtown Piano Lab now produces concerts beyond the club too — at St. Catherine’s Church, the Kaunas Philharmonic and the Palanga Kurhaus. We also organise private evenings, teach adults and run a children’s music club.

The word “Lab” means that we test formats rather than repeat them: one night classical, the next a jam session where someone from the audience walks up to the grand, politely warning us they haven’t played in years. So far it has never once been true.