Violin
Eugene Drucker is a founding member of the Emerson String Quartet and Music Director of the Bach at New Year’s concerts for the Berkshire Bach Society. He has appeared as a solo violinist with the orchestras of Montreal, Brussels, Antwerp, Liège, Hartford, Richmond, Omaha, Jerusalem, and the Rhineland-Palatinate, as well as with the American Symphony Orchestra, the Aspen Chamber Symphony, and the Las Vegas Philharmonic. A graduate of Columbia University and the Juilliard School, he served for two years as concertmaster of the Juilliard Orchestra, which featured him several times as soloist. He made his New York debut as a Concert Artists Guild winner in the fall of 1976, after winning prizes at the Montreal Competition and the Queen Elisabeth Competition in Brussels. He has recorded the complete unaccompanied works of Bach (Parnassus Records), the complete sonatas and duos of Bartók (Biddulph Recordings), and (with the Emerson Quartet) works ranging from Bach and Haydn to contemporary repertoire, mostly for Deutsche Grammophon. A nine-time Grammy and three-time Gramophone Classical Music Award winner, he is Visiting Professor of Chamber Music at Stony Brook University.
In 2008, his setting of four Shakespeare sonnets was premiered by baritone Andrew Nolen and the Escher String Quartet. The songs later appeared on the two-CD release Stony Brook Soundings, issued by Bridge Recordings. Additional compositions include Madness and the Death of Ophelia, based on four scenes from Hamlet; At the Edge of the Cliff, a setting of five poems by Denise Levertov for soprano and string quartet; and Series of Twelve, a string quartet commissioned by the New Music for Strings Festival, which premiered in Copenhagen and Reykjavík in August 2018 and was subsequently performed in the US by the Escher Quartet. Mr. Drucker’s first novel, The Savior, was published by Simon & Schuster in 2007 and subsequently appeared in a German translation called Wintersonate. A second novel, Yearning, was published in the fall of 2021. Recently completed projects include a novelization of Hamlet, a second song cycle based on the work of Denise Levertov, and a setting of Lucy Miller Murray’s Of Troubled Times, featured on the Musica Solis album Turning into Song. While teaching at Stony Brook and the Manhattan School of Music, Mr. Drucker will continue to appear as a chamber music player and soloist, hoping to find inspiration for further creative endeavors. Though far from retirement, he anticipates a more relaxed schedule, which will allow him to enjoy family life at greater leisure with his wife, Roberta Cooper.
