Berkeley Symphony violinist Eugene Chukhlov was born in Chimkent, an industrial town in the far south of the Soviet Union to which his parents’ families had both been deported during the Stalinist purges (his father was actually born on the train that took the family from Moscow to Central Asia).
Eugene’s father, also a violinist, found work as concertmaster of the opera orchestra in Amaty, Kazakhstan, and Eugene began studying at a music school there when he was six. When he was 15, his mother took him to Moscow, where he was accepted at the Gnesin Music College. After four years there, he moved on to the Moscow Conservatory of Music, where he and three friends formed a string quartet called the Arlekin Quartet. The young musicians were making good progress, but with the war in Afghanistan Eugene was drafted into the special forces and sent off to fight. His family has a long military tradition, but he had little stomach for killing women and children in a country that had done nothing to him, and he deserted from the army. The KGB had a file on him indicating that he was to be shot on sight, but a friend of the family used connections to have the file destroyed, and Eugene returned to Moscow, only to be drafted again. (This time he was able to do his service in Moscow.)
In 1990 he and the members of his quartet graduated from the Moscow Conservatory and, thanks to the spirit of perestroika, were allowed to come to the United States to play with a Russian theater company that was touring here. The quartet arrived in New York with four Canadian dollar bills, but after playing The Four Seasons in a subway station for a couple of hours they had made $250. A doctor in New Jersey gave them a place to stay, and after playing a few more hours in the subway they had made enough money to fly to San Francisco, where they began playing in BART stations and were featured on CNN.
Eugene says the quartet’s early months in this country were marked by generosity from many quarters. “When a person is trying to survive,” he observes, “most Americans try to lend a hand. We met really, really great people.” In Redding, where they had gone to join the theater company, another family took them in and helped them hire a lawyer. Two years later the same family helped the quartet buy a house in San Francisco.
The Arlekin Quartet traveled incessantly in those years, performing 60 to 70 concerts a year up and down the West Coast. They also began an association with San Francisco State University, where they filled in for the Alexander Quartet when they were on tour.
Eugene joined the Berkeley Symphony in the early nineties and has enjoyed a close relationship with Kent Nagano. He distinctly remembers the orchestra’s performance of Richard Strauss’ Ein Heldenleben in 1995. “At the very beginning,” says Eugene, “Kent actually jumped when he gave us the downbeat. That shocked me so much that I actually fell in love with the guy.”
The more recent performance of Manzanar: An American Story was another memorable Berkeley Symphony experience for Eugene, because it resonated so strongly with his own family’s experience in the Soviet Union. Manzanar also provided Eugene with the opportunity to help a student quartet at the Crowden School, where he has been teaching for the past two years. The group, which has three Japanese members, was rehearsing the Shostakovich 8th Quartet. Eugene had shared some Russian history with them, but it was the Manzanar story, which none of his students knew about, that really reached them. “It was amazing how their playing changed, because they became involved. They weren’t playing about a gulag that happened a century ago, but one that happened around the corner.”
Eugene met his wife, Canadian born Hungarian violinist and violist Edith Szendrey, at a Berkeley Symphony rehearsal, and they were married six months after that meeting. The couple lives in El Sobrante with their two-year-old daughter, Alexandra Marie, and Eugene’s parents have just moved from Europe to live across the street in a house he bought for them. His father, now 64, is already teaching violin to neighborhood children and at the Lamorinda Academy in Lafayette. When not involved with music, Eugene is an avid gardener, and he and Edith share a love of fishing California’s lakes.
—Richard Reynolds, December 2005
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