Yevgeny Kutik: Meditations on Family
Marquis Classics

Yevgeny Kutik is not only a violinist of remarkable ability, he's also a daring conceptualist who's been instrumental in the release of not one but two imaginative and intensely personal projects. In 2014, he issued Music from the Suitcase, a full-length recording based on sheet music his family brought with them when they emigrated from the former Soviet Union to the United States twenty years ago. Now, he's followed that with Meditations on Family, an EP-length set featuring miniatures by eight composers, each of who was asked to translate a personal family photo into a short piece. Adding to the recording's appeal, some are scored for solo violin, whereas others pair Kutik with another instrument, be it piano, bass, or clarinet. Only one, Joseph Schwanter's Daydreams, deviates from that approach in augmenting the violinist with four singers and glass harmonica.

The idea for the project originated, naturally, out of a family experience, specifically a photo his grandmother showed him in 2017 at a Thanksgiving get-together. When Kutik left the USSR as a four-year-old, she thought she'd never see him again; only three years later, however, she and her husband were welcomed by Kutik and his parents upon their arrival at Albany International Airport, and a photo documented the joyful moment of reuniting. Moved by the power of the image, Kutik asked composers to select family images of their own and translate them into musical form. There's a reason, incidentally, why only one piece exceeds three minutes: in the Russian-American violinist's own words, “I like this idea that when you are flipping through a family photo album, you don't spend ten minutes on each photo. Rather, you look at each one and there's a rush of emotion and then you go on to the next photo.”

Not surprisingly, many of the pieces exude a powerful nostalgic character when the composers revisit family-related moments. Inspired by an image of the composer's father as a small child in Italy, suffering from pneumonia and near death (which he survived), and infused with desperation, Christopher Cerrone's solo violin setting Flight to Limbo plays like an emotional outpouring. Gity Razaz drew for inspiration for her solo violin piece Cadenza for the Once Young from the love shared by her grandparents and, in keeping with that, exemplifies an openhearted, deeply romantic quality. Similarly inspired by a photo of the composer's maternal grandparents and his mother as a baby, Schwanter's Daydreams evokes a majestic world of sound in four-and-a-half minutes, Kutik's ecstatic expressions in this instance given an even more epic character when vocals (tenors Michael Barrett and Corey Hart, sopranos Sarah Moyer and Carey Shunskis) and the resonant shimmer of glass harmonica figure into the presentation.

Scored for violin and clarinet, Rima is Kinan Azmeh's attempt to musically render the humble joy and contentment experienced by him and his sister during a family trip to Bulgaria in 1979, the clarinetist in this performance not the composer but instead Ryan Yure, who proves to be a wonderful partner for Kutik in this wistful evocation. With pianist David Kaplan joining the violinist, Paola Prestini's elegant reverie Suitcased Dreams is livelier than many of the more nostalgia-laden pieces on the release. Kaplan returns for Litania, a dramatic musical interpretation by Andreia Pinto Correia inspired by a mid-'90s photo taken on the island of Madeira, the composer struck by how the view from the base of a subterranean passage at the São Tiago Fortress made it appear as if the stairs were rising directly towards the bright sky. Like Kaplan, double bassist Edwin Barker accompanies Kutik on two pieces, Timo Andres' See Above, which sees the violinist hovering high above the earthy ground established by his partner, and Gregory Vajda's How to Draw a Tree, which features Barker bowing deeply alongside short, agile gestures by the violinist.

May 2019