Violinist Yevgeny Kutik presents a collection of Russian rarities, "Music from the Suitcase". The pieces are selected from sheet music brought over to the USA when his family fled the Soviet Union in 1990. 

Included are rarely performed short works for violin and piano by prominent composers like Prokofiev, Stravinsky and Khachaturian, and gems by Andrei Eshpai and Georgy Sviridov, composers whose reputations never quite penetrated the Iron Curtain. Yevgeny is accompanied on the album by pianist Timothy Bozarth.

Yevgeny says: "As I continued to explore this music, they began to organize themselves into a distinct array of moods and themes, suffused with the character of Russian folklore, fantasy, and poetry… The pieces on this album carry with them a simplicity and directness, and with this immediacy, a striking beauty... It reminds me of what we went through and how far we have come."

This new recording also includes the haunting "Oyfn Pripetchik", a Yiddish song by M. M. Warshawsky that Mr. Kutik encountered during a trip to Poland during which he visited Auschwitz and other sites of Nazi atrocities.