Eugene Drucker
Violinist Eugene Drucker, a founding member of the Emerson String Quartet in 1976, is also an active soloist. He has appeared with the orchestras of Montreal, Brussels, Antwerp, Liege, 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, where he studied with Oscar Shumsky, Mr. Drucker was concertmaster of the Juilliard Orchestra, with which he appeared as soloist several times. He made his New York debut as a Concert Artists Guild winner in the fall of 1976, after having won prizes at the Montreal Competition and the Queen Elisabeth Competition in Brussels. Mr. Drucker has recorded the complete unaccompanied works of Bach for Parnassus Records and the complete sonatas and duos of Bartók for Biddulph Recordings.
Since 2017, Eugene Drucker has been the Music Director of Berkshire Bach Society’s “Bach at New Year’s” concerts.
With the Emerson String Quartet, Eugene Drucker plays about 70 concerts per year in North America, Europe and Asia. The quartet’s discography features a repertoire embracing the entire history of the string quartet from Haydn to contemporary works and has been rewarded with 9 Grammys and 3 Gramophone Magazine Awards.
His first novel, The Savior, was published by Simon & Schuster in 2007 and appeared in a German translation called Wintersonate. A second novel, Yearning, was published in the fall of 2021.
Mr. Drucker's compositional debut, a setting of four sonnets by Shakespeare, was premiered by baritone Andrew Nolen and the Escher String Quartet at Stony Brook in 2008; the songs have appeared as part of a 2-CD release called "Stony Brook Soundings," issued by Bridge Recordings in the spring of 2010. Subsequent works include Series of Twelve (a suite for string quartet, scheduled for several performances by the Escher Quartet this season); Madness and the Death of Ophelia, a musical adaptation of four scenes from Hamlet; and two song cycles based on the poetry of Denise Levertov, for high voice and strings.
Violins: Antonius Stradivarius (Cremona, 1686), Ryan Soltis (Idaho, 2015)