Professional musicians share experience with campers

Violinist Yevgeny Kutik is grateful he gets a chance to do what he loves.

“It’s so easy to forget how awesome this is, but it’s so awesome,” he said. “My two best friends who studied violin with me in college, one works for the government and one works for a hedge fund, and they both are doing very well but they miss it so much. Talking to them I’m reminded that it’s pretty awesome that every day I can go to work and make music.”

Sitting in the lobby of the Whitefish Performing Arts Center last week Kutik, along with pianist Tanya Gabrielian and virtuoso violinist Quinton Morris, met with young musicians attending Camp Amadeus, who got the chance to hear some advice from the professional musicians headlining Festival Amadeus.

Festival Amadeus celebrated its 10th anniversary with a week of chamber and orchestra performances in Whitefish, capped off by two showings of Mozart’s opera, “The Magic Flute.”

Between lessons, ensemble rehearsals and practice times, the campers sat down for the two Musical Journey talks with the professionals.

For Gabrielian, the big perks are the travel and the new food opportunities that come as a result of performing all over the world. She said it’s important to keep an entrepreneur mindset and promote herself as a musician.

Nobody is vouching for her but herself, she explained, and it takes a self-starter mentality to keep her career moving forward.

“You have to create your own opportunities – and be OK with having very bad health insurance,” she said with a chuckle.

When it all comes down to it, though, both musicians enjoy what they do, something that was apparent during their Wednesday night chamber music performance hours after the Musical Journey talk.

Gabrielian and Kutik performed a movement of Beethoven’s “Sonata for violin and piano No. 1,” which they later performed during the festival’s first night of chamber music at the O’Shaughnessy Center.

The piece is an early work in Beethoven’s repertoire, composed in 1798, seven years before he’d finish his ground breaking third symphony. The musicians talked with campers about the piece.

“I think what’s kind of amazing for me is that you see the early germs of all the stuff he’s going to put in later in music,” Kutik said of the composer.

“But he’s not too pompous yet,” Gabrielian chimed in.

During the informal talk, students asked what led the performers to take on music as a profession.

Gabrielian said for her, it came down to what she was good at and how she could pay for college through scholarships.

“I thought it was the more economic approach to education, which it was,” she said.

Jenanne Solberg, a music teacher at Whitefish Schools and North Valley Music School, said she took a similar approach, not knowing that she would eventually be led onto the path of teaching.

“I actually didn’t want to be a teacher either,” she said. “It wasn’t even on the list of what I would ever want to do. As it turned out, that’s probably what I was meant to do anyway, because I wouldn’t have it any other way. You just don’t necessarily always know.”

Open-mindedness when wading through career and life possibilities has been a key in Kutik’s own life, he said.

While situations can look dire at times, he told the students, he always trusts that good will come out of the challenges. Most of the time, he said, forks in the road happen for a good reason and it’s important to have the peace of mind to be OK with that.

“It’s really good to be open-minded,” he said. “The road keeps switching, you have to be open. It never goes the way you think it will go. It’s a series of unfolding events that kind of help shape you.”