The Rural We: Eugene Drucker
The renowned violinist, now artistic director of Berkshires Bach, introduces a new interdisciplinary series.
Now the artistic director of The Berkshire Bach Society, violinist Eugene Drucker was a founding member of the Emerson String Quartet. A nine-time Grammy and three-time Gramophone Magazine Award winner, he is visiting professor of chamber music at Stony Brook University and teaches at the Manhattan School of Music. Drucker is also a composer and author. He and his wife, Roberta Cooper, a cellist, have a home in Canaan, New York. Drucker was the longtime director of Berkshire Bach’s annual New Year’s concerts, but as artistic director he has created a new interdisciplinary series, Berkshire Bach Portals, which will present films, books, and talks about J.S. Bach.
Most of my career was spent performing with the Emerson Quartet, which disbanded last October after more than four decades. I have had a connection to the Berkshires as a professional since the mid 1990s, when my wife began to play with Berkshire Bach before I did. I got involved playing with Berkshire Bach a little later through the New Year’s Eve concerts. I played in all of them for over 20 years before they tapped me to become director of those concerts. Over a year ago, I began outlining things I could do if I were artistic director of the whole thing. I came up with this idea of an interdisciplinary series that would focus on Bach and other Baroque composers in one way or another. I knew a number of filmmakers who’d produced films relating to Bach, and authors of books about Bach. When I was appointed artistic director last January, everybody was interested in doing this new series, and then it was just a logistical question.
Most of the programs are hybrid in that they involve live musical performance, not as the main feature, but relevant to it. At the first, September 6-8, we’ll have a screening of “Strangers on Earth,” a documentary that follows the journey of cellist Dane Johansen as he walks the Camino de Santiago with his cello on his back. Johansen wasn’t available to join us, but Tristan Cook, the filmmaker, and I are going to discuss it. I’ll play a couple movements of Bach’s cello suites, not on the violin but on the viola.
The second event, November 8-10, we’ll present chorographer/dancer Peter Sparling. He had choreographed and filmed himself dancing to my recording of Bach’s Chaconne from the Partita No. 2 in D Minor, BWV 1004. I’ll perform the first four movements, then we’ll segue into the film, followed by a conversation afterward, with a Q&A.
In the third event in January, we’ll discuss the books Bach & God and Bach Against Modernity with author and musicologist Michael Marissen, who provocatively challenges us to rethink our preconceptions about Bach. The final program in March we’ll have another book reading with author James R. Gaines. His book, Evening in the Palace of Reason, is about the meeting of J.S. Bach with King Frederick the Great, and we’ll play the trio sonata from Bach’s Das Musikalisches Opfer, BWV 1079, the work Bach produced after that meeting.
Each of the programs in the Portals will be offered three times in various parts of the Berkshires and surrounding areas. The goal is to make it available in the southern half and northern half of the Berkshires, as well as the Pioneer Valley and Capital region. We want to make it a very welcoming experience for people, and to show Bach’s music from different angles.
