The Walsh-Drucker-Cooper trio first performed together at the Skaneateles Festival in the Finger Lakes region of New York in August, 2001. Their performance of Dvorak's F-minor trio on the festival's opening night concert was praised as "superb" by the Syracuse Post-Standard's critic. The trio returned to Skaneateles in 2002, 2003 and 2004; they have also appeared on other series including Maverick Concerts, Brooklyn Public Library, Music Festival of the Hamptons and PS 21 in NY; Friends of Chamber Music in New Orleans, LA; Crested Butte Festival, CO; Riverrun Chamber Concerts in Waitsfield and Capital City Concerts in Montpelier, VT. In June 2010 the group performed in Denmark, appearing at the Louisana Museum of Modern Art near Copenhagen and the medieval Stoense Church in Stoense, Langeland. The trio's performances have been broadcast nationally on Performance Today on National Public Radio; on WCNY-FM in Syracuse, WGBH-FM in Boston; and in a live broadcast on WNYC-FM in New York City.
The trio grew out of a musical partnership between Mr. Drucker and Ms. Walsh which began in 1991 at the Bard Music Festival in upstate New York, where they performed together for five successive summers. In recent seasons the duo has given four recitals at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington D.C., and has made two recordings: the complete Bartok Sonatas for violin and piano for Biddulph Recordings, and Copland's Two Ballads for Bridge Records.
Forthcoming Walsh-Drucker-Cooper Trio engagements include the Old Brick Church in West Brome, Quebec and a second tour of Denmark in 2012.
All trio members live in New York City: Ms. Walsh with her husband, the writer Richard Pollak, and Ms. Cooper and Mr. Drucker with their son, Julian.
Walsh-Drucker-Cooper Trio: Bio
Diane Walsh - pianist
Pianist DIANE WALSH, whose many awards include the top prizes at the Munich International Piano Competition and the Salzburg International Mozart Competition, has appeared with the radio symphonies of Munich, Frankfurt, Stuttgart and Berlin, the American Symphony and the symphonies of San Francisco, Indianapolis, Austin, Delaware and Syracuse. Young Concert Artists presented her New York debut recital, and her other recital engagements have included the Metropolitan Museum, Merkin Concert Hall, the 92nd Street Y and the Miller Theatre in New York City; the Kennedy Center in Washington, Orchestra Hall in Chicago, Wigmore Hall in London, the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, Philharmonic Hall in St. Petersburg, Dvorak Hall in Prague and the Mozarteum in Salzburg. Summer festivals where she has performed include Marlboro, Santa Fe, Bard, Chesapeake, Appalachian Summer, Strings, the International Musicians' Seminar, and the Skaneateles Festival, where she was also the artistic director from 1999 to 2004.
She was the pianist and music director in four productions of 33 Variations, a play by Moisés Kaufman, including the 2009 Broadway engagement at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre which starred Jane Fonda. The play is focused on Beethoven’s last years and his composition of the Diabelli Variations, which Ms. Walsh performs on stage throughout the play. In 2007 she released a recording, also entitled "33 Variations," of Beethoven's Diabelli Variations and the Sonata Op. 78 on the Jonathan Digital Recordings label. Ms. Walsh has made fifteen other recordings for labels which include Bridge, Newport, Sony, Nonesuch, Koch, Stereophile, and CRI. She has begun recording the complete Schubert Sonatas for Jonathan Digital and the first two volumes have been released. Ms. Walsh is a faculty member of Mannes College The New School for Music in New York City, and is a Steinway Artist. She holds degrees from Juilliard and Mannes and her major teachers were Irwin Freundlich and Richard Goode.
Eugene Drucker - violinist
Violinist EUGENE DRUCKER, a founding member of the Emerson String Quartet, has also been active as a solo artist. He has appeared with the orchestras of Montreal, Brussels, Antwerp, Liege, Austin, Hartford, Richmond, Toledo and the Rhineland-Palatinate, as well as the American Symphony Orchestra and the 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 the fall of 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, recently reissued by Parnassus Records, and the complete sonatas and duos of Bartok, for Biddulph Recordings. As a member of the Emerson Quartet, he has won 8 Grammy Awards for recordings of Bartok, Beethoven, Shostakovich, Mendelssohn and other composers. In the fall of 2002, he began a teaching affiliation with his Emerson colleagues at Stony Brook University. The quartet was awarded the Avery Fisher Prize (the first for a chamber ensemble in the history of that prize) in 2004.
"The Savior," Mr. Drucker's novel about music and the Holocaust, was published by Simon & Schuster in 2007, and appeared in paperback in 2008.
Roberta Cooper - cellist
Cellist ROBERTA COOPER was a winner of the Artists International Competition, which sponsored her debut in Weill Hall. She received both Bachelor's and Master's degrees from the Juilliard School, where she studied with Lorne Munroe and Harvey Shapiro. Ms. Cooper was a founding member of the Wave Hill Trio, in residence at Wave Hill (the Toscanini estate in Riverdale, New York). The trio also performed in Boston, Washington, D.C. and Los Angeles, and toured the Far East. She had the pleasure of joining the famed cello section of the Berlin Philharmonic in 2007 and 2009.
Ms. Cooper has performed with the Sea Cliff Chamber Players, and has been a frequent guest artist with the New Jersey Chamber Music Society and the Emerson String Quartet. Ms. Cooper was the featured cello soloist on a CD of jazz standards with famed pop singer Linda Ronstadt on Verve Records. She was a featured soloist at Merkin Hall's centenary celebration of Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco. Ms.Cooper appears regularly with the Berkshire Bach Society with harpsichordist Kenneth Cooper. She has performed chamber music at the Aspen, Bard, Cape and Islands, Crested Butte, St.Bart's, Santa Fe, Marlboro, Kneisel Hall, Mohawk Trail, Montreal, Maverick, Rockport, Skaneateles. and Casals Festivals.