Finding Home: Music from the Suitcase in Concert at

On Thursday, FEBRUARY 11, 2021 at 7pm ET, Russian-American violinist Yevgeny Kutik, will launch Finding Home: Music from the Suitcase in Concert, a five-episode docu-recital series filmed at the Shalin Liu Performance Center in Rockport, MA, based on Kutik's 2014 album Music from the Suitcase (Marquis Classics). Each 30-40-minute episode features music performances, including works from the album, interwoven with Kutik's personal narrative storytelling. Episodes will premiere weekly on Kutik's Facebook and YouTube channels every Thursday at 7pm ET beginning on FEBRUARY 11 and running through MARCH 11, 2021. Registrants will be emailed the links to watch by 5pm on Wednesdays. Kutik will be available for questions in the chat during the Thursday premieres, and each episode will be available for on-demand viewing until 12pm ET on the following Sunday.

When Yevgeny Kutik was five years old, he and his family emigrated from the deteriorating Soviet Union to the United States with the help of the Jewish Federations of North America. Although they had to leave most of their possessions behind and fit everything else into just two suitcases, Kutik's mother, a violin teacher, filled one of the suitcases with sheet music from the family's collection, believing that their music was a significant part of their family's musical history. Years later, Kutik began to explore the music from the suitcase and was enthralled with the pieces he discovered. He recorded a selection of this music on his critically acclaimed 2014 album, Music from the Suitcase: A Collection of Russian Miniatures (Marquis Classics), which debuted at No. 5 on the Billboard Classical chart and was featured on NPR's All Things Considered and in The New York Times.

Each episode revolves around a theme of "finding home" as Kutik explores anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union, his family's months as "stateless" refugees, the amazement and challenges of starting a new home in the United States, his teachers and mentors, and lessons for the future.

Kutik explains the inspiration for this docu-recital series: "In 2020, as the pandemic cancelled concerts and upended plans for the foreseeable future, I was in search of inspiration. As I began sifting through these musical pages that my family brought over, it dawned on me that as difficult as this pandemic and resultant loss of opportunity was, with strength and determination, there would always be a way to begin again, to rebuild from nothing, as so tangibly represented by these scores.

I spent the quiet months of quarantine collecting memories and stories from my family, looking through family photographs, and at the same time, for my own enjoyment, playing through some of my favorite scores from school and concerts over the past years. I began to realize that much like the collection of music my family brought over, I now had my own sheet music, representing my journey thus far: a semblance of a musical "home," and of teachers, memories, and community."