Eugene Drucker

violin, composition, chamber music

Violinist Eugene Drucker, founding member of the Grammy Award-winning Emerson String Quartet, is also an active soloist. He has appeared with the orchestras of Montreal, Brussels, Antwerp, Hartford, Richmond, Memphis and Jerusalem, as well as the American Symphony Orchestra and Aspen Chamber Symphony.

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 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, 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 subsequently appeared in a German translation called Wintersonate.

Mr. Drucker faculty at Stony Brook University. His compositional debut, a setting of Shakespeare sonnets, was premiered by baritone Andrew Nolen and the Escher Quartet 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 adaptation of three scenes from Hamlet for mezzo-soprano/speaker and quartet, was premiered at Symphony Space in 2014.

As a member of the Emerson String Quartet, Mr. Drucker is the recipient of nine Grammy Awards, including two for Best Classical Album, as well as three Gramophone Magazine Awards and the Avery Fisher Prize. The quartet was also named Ensemble of the Year by Musical America in 2000, and was awarded honorary doctorates by Middlebury College (1995), The College of Wooster (2006), Bard College (2009) and the University of Hartford (2011).