The world at his fingertips

Berkshire Eagle (August 25, 2006) -- Berkshire Eagle, The (Pittsfield, MA)

August 24, 2006
"The world at his fingertips"

Andrew L. Pincus, Special to The Eagle
Friday, August 25 LENOX Destination: a soloist's career.

"I definitely want to aim high, you know," Yevgeny Kutik says. "I want to be a soloist, and I've worked hard for it, and I feel like finally I'm actually getting there. Like, I'm getting more recognition from all over the place. And I'm getting more invitations from all over the place. So it's just a matter of perseverance and meeting the right people."

Next stop for the 21-year-old Pittsfield resident, who is just out of his second summer as a Tanglewood student, is the International Violin Competition of Indianapolis, which opens a week from today. Fifty-one young violinists from 32 countries are entered. The gold medal winner receives a $30,000 prize, Carnegie Hall recital and loan of a 1683 Stradivarius violin.

From Indianapolis, Kutik returns to Boston University, where he will be in his senior year, and begins a round of recital and concerto engagements.

Shy-seeming despite his ambition, Kutik says his second Tanglewood summer was even more productive than the first. He knew what to expect and could focus better on the things he had to do. They included heading violin sections in rehearsal and concert for conductors Bernard Haitink and James Levine, playing the premiere of a concerto commissioned by the Tanglewood Music Center, and learning his repertoire for Indianapolis.
Being able to live at home instead of in the student housing at Miss Hall's School in Pittsfield helped. There were fewer distractions from practice.

Despite the residential difference, Kutik's schedule was pretty much typical for all of the music center's 150 fellows, who receive free tuition and (if they choose to use it) room and board. Each student gets at least one major assignment. Kutik's was the premiere of Ron Ford's "Versus," a concerto with the unusual supporting ensemble of 10 winds and four double basses.
It wasn't easy. Kutik got his part a month before the TMC season was to begin. While he was learning it for a trial run during the first week of the season, the composer began making revisions.
Gulp. "The day before my first rehearsal with orchestra," Kutik recalls, "the library gives me this part which looks very different than what I had before." But that was what he played a few days later.

In the long run, the revisions and extra month before the formal premiere on July 30 helped, Kutik says.

"I had time to grow and it (the concerto) started to make more sense to me. But it was pretty difficult to learn, especially not having a recording to listen to. And a lot of the problems were rhythmical, very difficult, like coordinating with the conductor and orchestra. So I really had to work hard."

Faculty violinist Andrew Jennings, Kutik's coach for this and other performances during the summer, was concerned because of all the changes in the solo part. He feared Kutik would "freak out on me four or five days before the first performance."

Not so. Kutik "looked perplexed that I would have been concerned at all." He just read off the corrections 'and there was no problem at all," Jennings goes on. "He's quite remarkable. He's so facile and he's so high-energy and has great chops on the fiddle and seems to be unflappable, all of which are nice signs for the future."

Kutik also is "just fine" in chamber music, Jennings says. He blends in where he's supposed to and "when he needs to shine, it's there."

This wasn't the first time that Yevgeny, the son of Alla Zernitskaya and Alex Kutik, had to shine. As the winner of statewide competitions, he has been a soloist twice with the Boston Pops under Keith Lockhart.

Shostakovich's Concerto No. 1, part of which he played with the Pops, is a favorite piece. The Russian music comes naturally. The family emigrated from Minsk, Belarus, in 1990. His mother is a violin teacher and directs a chamber orchestra at Pittsfield High School, in which Yevgeny, a PHS graduate, got basic training.

Leading the TMC Orchestra's second violin section in Shostakovich's Symphony No. 10 under Haitink was one of the season highs for this violinist. Leading the third violins for Levine in Strauss' opera "Elektra" was another outstanding experience.

Rapport and cooperation, rather than competition, mark relations among students, Kutik found. They cheer one another at concerts.

There's a feeling that "we're in this together," Kutik says. "And I think everyone wants to make the best possible product. That's part of the reason why the orchestra sounds so good. I've been in orchestras before where people don't want to be there, and I can say that in this orchestra people want to be there and they really want it to sound amazing."

Kutik sees an awakening interest in classical music among college students, including nonmusicians, in Boston.

"For them, it's kind of new," he says. They want to find out what it's like. Although their concert attendance still lags, some are already to be seen in the less expensive seats in Symphony Hall, he says.

Twice a student, at 13 and 15, at the lower-level Boston University Tanglewood Institute, Kutik isn't sure what happens after TMC and college. He will continue to play recitals for the nationwide organization United Jewish Communities, also speaking to the groups about his family's emigration. Recent programs have been in San Francisco, Tampa and Boston.

He also has other recital and concerto dates coming up. And just this past Monday in Pittsfield, he took part in a community program at the Colonial Theatre, preliminary to its formal opening. Again, he played part of the Shostakovich concerto, along with a Brahms sonata and other works.

Interested in political science and international relations as well as music, Kutik is thinking of going to a place like Yale, where he could continue his violin studies at the school of music while taking other courses "to round myself out."
With such a background, he could "speak about matters of foreign importance and somehow relate it all to music," somewhat as he does now for the Jewish groups.

Meanwhile, he's looking for a better violin. His own instrument is a good one but not strong enough for the big concert halls he's now performing in. He's been playing a "really great' violin on loan from his teacher at B.U., 95-year-old Roman Totenberg, but must return it next month. He'd like to sell his own violin and borrow something better.

"Even if my violin does sell, the very outrageous price of good violins today is far above what I could afford," he says. Either someone will lend him a fine instrument or he'll have to continue playing the one he owns.

The would-be soloist needs more experience, "which he'll get real fast," says Jennings, his coach at Tanglewood.

But "he has all the gifts, as far as I can see. He has all this fire and temperament in him. He seems to be very quick at figuring everything out, and he's a nice guy, too � very personable. So everything is in place."


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