Photos by Corey Hayes

CFA Alumni

Yevgeny Kutik Plays for Community

The violinist will return to CFA for a residency in February

“I didn’t play well, for whatever reason,” says Kutik (BUTI’00, CFA’07). “I remember packing up at the end of the hour, and it was just kind of awkward. I told him, ‘Look, Mr. Totenberg, I’m so frustrated, it’s just not getting better.’” Totenberg stared at him in silence, then offered a single instruction: “Listen.”

“I said, ‘OK, see you next week,’ and walked out fairly annoyed,” Kutik remembers. “But then, week by week, I was like, that really is the secret—to music, to art, to everything. You just listen. And in the listening, everything sort of comes together. It was very profound.”

Totenberg was a School of Music professor emeritus and former chair of the string department when he died in 2012, at 101. Kutik had studied privately with him as a teenager and says the professor was the main reason he chose BU over other schools.

Now a chamber musician, orchestral soloist, and recording artist, Kutik will return to 855 Comm Ave, briefly, as teacher. In February 2026, he’ll lead a career development workshop including a talk titled “The Art of Creative Endurance: Building a Life in the Arts through Resilience and Ingenuity.”

From Belarus to Billboard

Kutik began his life behind the Iron Curtain. He and his parents emigrated to the United States in 1990, when he was five, leaving behind Minsk, Belarus, for a new life in Pittsfield, Mass. His father had played trumpet in the Belarussian State Philharmonic and became a computer programmer in the US; his mother taught violin in both countries. As a teenager, Kutik studied in precollege programs at Juilliard, the New England Conservatory, and the BU Tanglewood Institute, before earning a bachelor’s degree in violin performance at CFA and a master’s from the New England Conservatory.

Kutik made his big-time solo debut in 2003 with the Boston Pops and has played with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra and many other ensembles at the Kennedy Center, Tanglewood, and Ravinia. In 2014, he released Music from the Suitcase, which the New York Times praised for its “dark-hued tone and razor-sharp technique.”

The album features recordings of sheet music that Kutik’s mother brought with her in her luggage when the family emigrated. Some of the pieces, Kutik eventually discovered, were by great Russian composers, but all were influenced by vernacular songs—folk tunes enjoyed by everyday people. The album debuted at No. 5 on the Billboard Classical chart.

Recording Music from the Suitcase “was almost a cathartic experience,” Kutik says. “It helped me to better understand myself, and so I started going down that road, trying to understand the music that my family—and that other families—bring with them on their journeys in life. Music is so connected to who we are as people.”

For his Meditations on Family, released in 2019, Kutik commissioned works from contemporary composers inspired by their family snapshots. One of his ears was still attuned to his past.

“I grew up with my grandparents, my parents, and other relatives in this small little bubble in western Mass.,” he says. “At home, I was speaking Russian; in school, speaking English, trying to assimilate. At home, I had a completely different culture, and I kept hearing stories about antisemitism [in Belarus], and I’m piecing together a whole life that came before me. One way that I ended up doing that was through music.”

“Do Something for Your Neighbors”

“In the Soviet Union, everyone knew you were Jewish—it was printed on your birth certificate and passport, marking you in the public eye,” Kutik says. “There wasn’t one single incident that drove my family to leave, but a relentless accumulation of indignities and threats that became unbearable.”

As a small child, he was mostly unaware of the whispers from other parents and being excluded by fellow preschoolers. But his mother was dismissed from her conservatory job after they had “filled” their Jewish quota. Officials and colleagues frequently told members of the family to “move somewhere that actually wants Jews.” His great-grandfather was murdered by a factory coworker for being Jewish—a crime that went unpunished.

Kutik heard the stories and, along with his faith and music, they led him on a path of activism and community involvement.

“I am involved with various organizations to try to help raise awareness of antisemitism, and immigrants and refugees. Because I, myself, was a refugee.”

Kutik has played at Auschwitz twice for events commemorating the liberation of the concentration camp. For years he traveled the United States and gave talks at Jewish organizations raising money to support their local communities, including new immigrants of all faiths and others in need.

“One of the most impressive things that Jewish communities across the country are doing is not solely focused on Jewish [people],” he says. “They’re just local meals and resources for everyone.”

He and his wife, Rachel Barker, a writer and an educator, also give back to their community through music. They recently started the Birch Festival in and around Lenox, Mass., where artists perform chamber music for a week in the spring and fall.

“Do something for your neighbors and their neighbors, and then you work outwards,” he says, “But start there.”

His beliefs are also vividly reflected in his art. In April, Kutik will play the Newport Classical Music Festival with pianist Llewellyn Sánchez-Werner, performing a world premiere commission by Jonathan Leshnoff (BUTI’90). It’s based on a letter that George Washington wrote to the Jewish congregation of Newport, R.I., saying that Jews will have religious freedom in the United States.

The letter includes a famous line: “May the Children of the Stock of Abraham, who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other Inhabitants; while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and figtree, and there shall be none to make him afraid.”

“It’s a very beautiful letter,” Kutik says.