Violinist Yevgeny Kutik Releases 'Music from the Suitcase' Today

Twenty-eight-year-old Russian-American violinist Yevgeny Kutik's new solo album, Music from the Suitcase: A Collection of Russian Miniatures, will be released by Marquis Classics today, April 15. The album features recordings of sheet music found in one of two suitcases the Kutik family brought to the United States when they emigrated from the Soviet Union in 1990, a story recently explored in The New York Times and on NPR's All Things Considered. Along with works by Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Stravinsky, and Tchaikovsky, the album includes rarely recorded works by Andrei Eshpai, Aram Khachaturian, Anton Rubinstein, and Gyorgy Sviridov, along with a song by M. M. Warshawsky transcribed for violin.

The New York Times said, "[Mr. Kutik's mother] Ms. Zernitskaya was forced to leave her violin behind-it was valuable and therefore deemed public property-and relatives told her she would never be able to find work as a musician, anyway. Nevertheless, she decided to pack a stack of anthologies of short works for violin that she had used in her teaching. She owned more important editions of concertos with bowings and fingerings by famous Russian violinists like David Oistrakh, but she had a hunch she might be able to find those in the West."

The album was recorded with pianist Timothy Bozarth, a Beethoven Fellow of the American Pianists Association, and includes liner notes written by Mr. Kutik. The album is available for preorder on Amazon and iTunes, with a sample track now streaming on SoundCloud.