(GREAT BARRINGTON, Mass.) – The Berkshire Bach Ensemble will ring out the old and ring in the new with its annual Bach at New Year’s program featuring all six Brandenburg Concerti at the Mahaiwe on Saturday, December 31, at 6pm. The program – featuring violinist Eugene Drucker, a cofounder of the Emerson String Quartet – will also take place at the Academy of Music in Northampton, Mass., on Friday, December 30, at 7:30pm, and at the Troy [N.Y.] Savings Bank Music Hall on Sunday, January 1, at 3pm.
This year’s program will be Kenneth Cooper’s 23rd and final time serving as music director of the Bach at New Year’s series.
Drucker will perform under the direction of Kenneth Cooper at the harpsichord and twenty other Berkshire Bach Ensemble members in a program of all six Brandenburg Concerti.
Other musicians include Marjorie Bagley and Joel Pitchon, violin; Ronald Gorevic, violin and viola; Liuh-Wen Ting, Irena McGuffee, viola; Roberta Cooper, Lucy Bardo, Alistair MacRae, cello; Peter Weitzner, bass; Aldo Abreu, recorder; Judith Mendenhall, Alison Hale, flute; Marsha Heller, Meg Owens, Gerard Reuter, oboe, English horn; Stephen Walt, bassoon; Gerald Serfass, trumpet; Allan Dean, Neil Mueller, horns; Lucy Bardo, Ben Harms, percussion, gamba.
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 and Aspen Chamber Symphony.
A graduate of Columbia University and the Juilliard School, where he studied with Oscar Shumsky, 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.
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 has appeared in a German translation called Wintersonate, published by Osburg Verlag in Berlin.
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.
Eugene Drucker lives in New York with his wife, cellist Roberta Cooper, and their son Julian.