Eugene Drucker Guests With Frankly Music
Founding member and violinist with renowned Emerson Quartet for 47 years will perform Faure, Bartok and more.
L to R: Eugene Drucker, Roberta Cooper, Marta Aznavoorian (credit Lisa Marie Mazzucco), Frank Almond (credit Jennifer Brindley)
In 2020, violinist Frank Almond ended his 25-year run as concertmaster of the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra to pursue other musical endeavors. On Monday evening, Jan. 29, another internationally-prominent violinist undergoing a major career transition will join Almond in performance in a Frankly Music chamber concert.
That violinist is Eugene Drucker, a founding member of the Emerson String Quartet. Drucker and fellow musicians formed the ensemble at Julliard in 1976. The group, described by the New York Times as “one of the most celebrated ensembles in classical music for almost half a century,” disbanded in October 2023. Throughout its 47 years, noted the Times, the quartet “became famous for its rich vitality and easy power in a vast repertory that it recorded prolifically and toured tirelessly.”
Almond was 19 years old when he met Drucker, and considers him a mentor. “He was one of the first musicians I met who really had a big career,” Almond said. Frequent conversations with Drucker shared insights about repertoire, programming, the music business and the realities of life as a professional performer: “It can be glamorous; it can be fun; it can be awful.” And, as both Almond and Drucker know, it can evolve.
Almond and Drucker will open the Jan. 29th concert with Georg Philipp Telemann’s Suite for two violins, “Gulliver’s Travels,” TWV 40:108. The five-movement piece is a musical interpretation of the fantastic creatures met by Lemuel Gulliver, the sea-going narrator of Jonathan Swift’s 1726 satirical novel. Movements describe the 6-inch Lilliputians; the giant Brobdingnagians; the intellectual but impractical Laputians; the monkey-like Yahoos, and the orderly, rational Houyhnhnms. Telemann’s score challenges the players with musical motifs like 128th notes as diminutive as the Lilliputians and a time signature of 24 beats to the whole note appropriate for the lumbering Brobdingnagians.
A selection of pieces chosen from a group of 44 duos for two violins by Béla Bartók follows. Written in 1931 as teaching material for young violinists, the set is based on Eastern European folk tunes.
Cellist Roberta Cooper is added to the ensemble for the performance of Franz Joseph Haydn’s Trio for Strings, Opus 53 No. 1. Drucker will play the viola part for the work, scored for violin, viola, and cello. Hadyn wrote the Trio in 1784 while he was working as Kapellmeister (music director) for the Esterházy court.
Pianist Marta Aznavoorian joins the trio for the performance of the Piano Quartet in C minor, Op. 15 by Gabriel Fauré. Fauré composed the work in 1879, revising it in 1883 by writing a new finale. Edition Silvertrust, a music publisher, notes that Fauré’s chamber music imaginatively integrated the piano. “Using opposing arpeggios, chords and runs against the singing of a single instrument or a group of them, and giving the piano an equal role in a rich contrapuntal texture, [he] created a dazzling variety of tonal effects.”
Frankly Music’s performance begins at 7 p.m. Monday, Jan. 29, at Schwan Concert Hall, Wisconsin Lutheran College, 8815 W. Wisconsin Ave., Wauwatosa. Tickets are available online.
UPDATE: An earlier version of this article had a different title.
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