Eugenia Zukerman

Eugenia Zuckerman is one of the world's best-known flutists, known for her particular interest in innovative ways of bringing classical music to new audiences and in musical education. She is also an author of novels and nonfiction books. She was born Eugenia Rich in the Boston suburb that is the home of Harvard University. A flute student since childhood, she began her higher education as an English major at Barnard College. Soon her interest in music asserted itself and transferred to the Juilliard School of Music in New York, where from 1964 to 1966 she was a pupil of the leading flutist Julius Baker, soloist with the New York Philharmonic. In 1970, she won the Young Concert Artists Concert Audition, which earned her as a prize her debut recital at New York's Town Hall in 1971. The recital won rave reviews, and initiated a major worldwide concert and recital career. She has performed with some of the major orchestras of North America, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. These include the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Minnesota Orchestra, the English Chamber Orchestra, the Israel Chamber Orchestra, and the National Symphony Orchestra of Washington, D.C. She is very active on the international music festival scene, with appearances at the Aspen Music Festival, the Angel-Fire Festival, Mostly Mozart, the OK Mozart International Festival, the Ravinia Festival, Tanglewood, Edinburgh, the South Bank Festival in London, the Spoleto Festival in Italy, the Yehudi Menuhin Gstaad Festival in Switzerland, and the Schleswig-Holstein Festival. She became the Music Director of the Vail Valley Music Festival in Colorado in 1998. In 1968, she married the famous violinist Pinchas Zukerman and frequently appeared with him in concert. They were divorced in 1985. In 1980, she became the arts correspondent for the CBS Sunday Morning news program and, over the course of that association, has done over 300 artist profiles. In 1988, she began a regular lecture-performance series with keyboard player Anthony Newman at the New York Public Library's Celeste Bartos Forum. These concerts combine musical performance with readings from letters and other historical documents shedding light on the music. The concert-lectures are short, given just after the end of a working day and are the prototype for the increasingly popular American concept of rush-hour concerts. Eugenia has recorded for the CBS Masterworks, ProArte, Vox Cum Laude, and Newport Classics labels, followed by an exclusive contract with Delos Records. As an author, she has written two published novels, Deceptive Cadence (Viking, 1981) and Taking the Heat (Simon and Schuster, 1991), and a nonfiction book. The latter is the result of being diagnosed with a career-threatening, rare lung disease that required her to take the cortisone-based medication Prednisone. Concerned with the problems of potential side effects, she joined with her sister, physician Julie R. Inglefinger, to write Coping with Prednisone (and Other Cortisone-Related Medicines): It May Work Miracles but How Do You Handle the Side Effects (St. Martin's Press, 1997). She has also sold three screen plays, one each to 20th Century Fox, MGM, and Universal Pictures, and has been published in Esquire, Vogue, and the New York Times magazines, among others.
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