Eugene Drucker
Violinist Eugene Drucker, a founding member of the Emerson String Quartet, 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. Eugene Drucker has recorded the complete unaccompanied violin works of Bach, reissued by Parnassus Records, and the complete sonatas and duos of Bartók for Biddulph Recordings. His novel, The Savior, was published by Simon & Schuster in 2007 and appeared in a German translation called Wintersonate, published by Osburg Verlag in 2010. 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. Madness and the Death of Ophelia, a concert piece for female speaker/singer and string quartet based on four scenes from Hamlet, was presented in Aarhus by New Music for Strings in 2016; At The Edge of The Cliff, a setting of five poems by Denise Levertov for soprano and string quartet, was premiered at the New Music for Strings Festival in New York and Stony Brook in 2017; and Series of Twelve, a suite for string quartet, had its premiere performances at New Music for Strings in Copenhagen and Reykjavik in 2018. Yearning, Drucker’s second novel, is scheduled for publication later this year.
Eugene Drucker is a Visiting Professor of Chamber Music at Stony Brook University; he lives in New York City with his wife, cellist Roberta Cooper.
Violins: Antonius Stradivarius (Cremona, 1686), Ryan Soltis (Moyie Springs, Idaho, 2016)