The Emerson String Quartet founder’s performance and reading, followed by a conversation with the audience, is the first of this season’s Berkshire Bach Portals programs.
Saturday, November 7, 3pm | Lenox, MA
Violinist Eugene Drucker, a founding member of the Emerson String Quartet and artistic director of the Berkshire Bach Society, reads from his first novel, The Savior, and plays the Chaconne from J.S. Bach’s Partita No. 2 in D minor, BWV 1004, in Studio E at Tanglewood’s Linde Center for Music and Learning on Saturday afternoon. The Tanglewood Learning Institute presents the event in tandem with the Berkshire Bach Society. A conversation with the audience follows.
The Savior, published by Simon & Schuster in 2007, is a character study of a young violinist in Nazi Germany who is ordered to play for prisoners in a concentration camp. He struggles with his conscience as he sees what the camps are and is devastated to realize his own complicity. Drucker has said he drew on his father’s experience as a Jewish musician. He has also published a second novel, Yearning, in 2021.
The event is the first of the 2026-27 BBS Portals programs, a quarterly series on how Bach’s music has influenced artists in other disciplines. Through mid-December, Tanglewood Learning Institute concerts are a drop-off point for the U.S. Marine Corps Reserve Toys for Tots program. Guests are asked to bring a new, unwrapped, non-violent toy for the collection boxes in the Linde Center lobby.
Studio E, Linde Center for Music and Learning, Tanglewood, 297 West Street, Lenox, MA. Tickets at bso.org or 617-266-1200.
