The music moves her
Story by Eliot Sekuler & photo by Joe Cantrell
For the TODAY
Michelle Bushkova was calling from Switzerland’s Geneva National String Academy, an annual event combining master classes and public performances featuring an elite group of young musicians from around the world. It was the latest stop in the globetrotting life of the Russian-born 19-year-old musician who has already appeared on stages from her native Moscow to Mumbai, from Brussels to Istanbul.
This summer, her travels will take her to the Oregon Coast, where she’ll be performing in eight of the Siletz Bay Music Festival’s 11 concerts during the last week of August and first week of September. She’ll be featured on both violin and piano, a rarity in the classical music world, where the mastery of a single instrument is most often a lifetime pursuit.
Despite being accustomed to frequent travel as a musical wunderkind, the past couple of years have been particularly unsettled. She’d been studying at the prestigious Cleveland Institute of Music, founded by famed composer and Agate Beach resident Ernest Bloch, when Russia launched the war on Ukraine.
“I was quite shocked,” she said, speaking in barely accented, perfectly colloquial English. “Before then, I thought of Cleveland as a temporary situation, but after February 2022, I started looking at it with different eyes. I started processing that Russia wasn’t my home anymore.”
Her family, steadfastly opposed to the war, realized it was time to leave, a difficult decision considering the family’s deep roots in Russia. Her father, the acclaimed conductor and violinist Yevgeny Bushkov, gave up his professional appointments and with her mother, an artist and architect, left Moscow for Vienna to stay with relatives. They expect to soon be leaving for Israel, where Yevgeny will be teaching master classes in violin. Meanwhile, Michelle returned to her studies in Cleveland where, for the present, “home” is a relative term.
“I’m just going around everywhere,” she said. “If I consider `home’ to be where my parents live, `home’ will be in Israel. But for now, Cleveland is my most official place of residence.”
Her appearances at the Siletz Bay Music Festival will mark the young Bushkova’s second visit to Oregon’s stages. In May, she was the centerpiece of an extraordinary concert with the Portland Chamber Orchestra at Beaverton’s Reser Auditorium, “From Darkness to Light” which was designed by the orchestra’s artistic director, Yaki Bergman, to address the plight of refugees around the world. The concert featured a violin concerto – “The Michelle Concerto”— written specifically for her by Belarusian composer Victor Copytsko, who, like the Bushkov family, was targeted by his government for his opposition to the Ukraine war. Playing with polished grace and poise, she brought the piece to life with elegance and flawless execution. Switching to piano as soloist for a Mozart concerto, her enthusiasm was infectious and her intonation impeccable. Her connection to the orchestra, the conductor and the audience was that of a confident soloist.
In addition to her father, Bushkova’s entire family has deep connections to the Russian music establishment. Her brother, Marc Bouchkov, is an acclaimed violinist. Her grandfather was a principal violinist with the Soviet State Symphony and her grandmother was a celebrated violinist and long-time teacher at the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory, where Michelle was also a student.
Given the family history, it was not surprising when the four-year-old Bushkova asked her parents to get her a violin.
“My father was conflicted, because he knows perfectly well how difficult it is to raise a musician child,” she said. “But my mom said, `Don’t worry. She’s just a kid. She’ll forget about it in a few days.’ But no. Two weeks later, I was hysterically asking, `where’s my violin?’ They finally gave in and brought me one.”
It was her father who suggested she also take lessons on the piano and from an early age, she studied and practiced intensively on both instruments. She laughed when asked which instrument she prefers: “If I preferred one, I wouldn’t play the two,” she answered, adding that there are differences in the way she relates to the two instruments. “The violin is my voice. I feel that it’s a part of me and that it expresses things that I would like to express with my own voice. The piano is different. When I sit at the piano, there’s this black wooden monster in front of me that I have to befriend to make it do something.”
The violin she plays is a family heirloom, and Bushkova believes it to be an object of destiny. “Remember in ‘Harry Potter’ when Harry goes to the shop and the magician tells him that it isn’t the wizard who chooses a wand, but the other way around? The wand chooses the wizard, he says. It was that way with my violin,” she said. “It chose me. My grandmother bought it and played it for years. it’s my family instrument and I’m very lucky to have it.”
Her performances at the Siletz Bay Music Festival will include several pieces she’s never played before, ranging from a Gershwin duet on piano with violinist James Stern to George Crumb’s avant-garde “Voice of the Wale,” which will require her, in some passages, to slip beneath the lid of her piano to pluck the strings, something she has never done in performance.
“The Festival will be a new experience for me,” she said. “And I’m really looking forward to it.”