JUDY DRUCKER, 91
She brought some of classical music’s biggest stars to Miami,
Luciano Pavarotti. Plácido Domingo. José Carreras. Mikhail Baryshnikov. Zubin Mehta. Beverly Sills.
The greatest names in the world of classical music played South Florida and they played here in great part because of one woman.
A dynamo named Judy Drucker.
Drucker, who died Monday in Miami at age 91 of complications from Alzheimer’s, devoted more than half a century to her aptly named Great Artists Series.
Drucker founded the Concert Association of Florida in 1967 and began hosting
Great Artist Series shows at Temple Beth Sholom in Miami Beach. She brought those major names, and many more, to concert stages throughout South Florida.
“A lot of the great names we know as the greats were really discovered by Judy.
She was aware of them long before they were household names,” Great Artist Series’ President Mark Bryn told the Miami Herald in November 2017 when the classical music community honored her with a tribute concert to celebrate the series’ 50th anniversary.
“It’s absolutely delightful that people remember anything that I did,” Drucker said during the tribute. Remember what she did? “She was an earth-shattering, groundbreaking woman,” said Angela Shlyakhov, who served as executive vice president of the Great Artist Series from 2016 to December 2019. She helped organize the tribute and created a website to celebrate Drucker’s life.
Shlyakhov also helped convince the Florida Division of Historical Resources to designate a historical marker to honor Drucker’s achievements. The marker was placed at Temple Beth Sholom in 2017. At the time, of the approximate 950 markers throughout Florida, only six honored individual women, according to state records.
‘A PIONEER’
“She was a pioneer and she had a mission to bring the art of fine music and culture to what was then a small Southern city,” said Mark Nedlin, the South Florida Symphony Orchestra’s development officer who produced the 2017 tribute.
“For Judy, this started in 1967 when almost no one paid attention to women,” Shlyakhov added. “She brought culture to us and without her there was no culture in Miami Beach at the time — it was a true cultural wasteland in 1967.”
For Shlyakhov, the relationship with Drucker dates back 42 years to 1978 when Shlyakhov was 8 with a love for ballet. She was part of a wave of about 30 families — Russian Jewish immigrants fleeing religious persecution — that Drucker, working alongside the Greater Miami Jewish Federation, helped bring to Miami.
“My father was an artist and photographer and came here with $200,” Shlyakhov said. “Judy would give us tickets for free. That was a huge thing. We got to see all this cultural stuff at the Jackie Gleason Theater and the Miami-Dade Auditorium.
This affinity for blending cultures was perhaps her greatest accomplishment, according to her son Andrew Drucker.
“I was 4 in 1960 when Cubans who escaped from Castro started to come to Miami Beach,’’ he said. “She loved the Latin influence. I remember these new kids started to show up in my neighborhood.
“She helped find them places to live and bought some of them furniture. My mom and dad, David, who passed away in 1980, were really giving people.”
“She loved the arts and music and loved Miami. She really dug this city,” her son said.
BORN IN BROOKLYN
Drucker was born Judith Nelson in Brooklyn’s Flatbush neighborhood in New York, on June 20, 1928. Her mother was a classical pianist and Drucker, a child musical prodigy, discovered she could sing.
She studied at the High School of Music and Art, Juilliard and the Curtis Institute of Music.
When she moved to Miami around 1948, as a young bride with her husband David, she studied voice at the University of Miami’s School of Music. She sang in the chorus of what was then called the Miami Opera.
That’s where she began a lifelong friendship with an Italian tenor making his U.S. debut — Luciano Pavarotti.
Pavarotti, until he died at 71 in 2007, became a regular in Drucker’s bookings. For decades he affectionately called Drucker, “Judy beauty.”
For a number of years, Drucker put her music career on hold to raise her growing family — two daughters and a son.
“With all of her accomplishments, besides that, she was a very good mother,” her daughter Vicki Schwartz said. “She loved her kids unconditionally. She was always there for them and a role model that made all of us the wonderful parents we became to our own children.”
Drucker’s grandchild Jeffrey Lynne said after his parents divorced, the family dynamic was such that his mom, Kathy, was almost like a bigger sister and Drucker assumed the mom role.
“For whatever reason, she took me under her wing,” said Lynne, 49.
Drucker took her little grandson to her business meetings in New York. Her famous friends’ children — like Nobel Peace Prize-winning author Elie Wiesel’s son, Shlomo Elisha Wiesel — became Lynne’s playmates at the house he lived in in Miami Beach.
“She was an amazing person. I got to see a side of her the others didn’t see. She was tough in the business world, but in our world she switched over to Jewish grandmother mode and I think that is what endeared her to so many of the artists.
“Rather than just being an impresaria, producer, booking agent, she treated everybody that way — like family.”
PAVAROTTI, ITZHAK PERLMAN WERE FRIENDS
For the Great Artist Series’ second season in 19681969, Drucker needed a violinist, “preferably an Israeli because I was still at the temple,” she told the Herald in 2006.
So she asked the head of Juilliard Music School at the time, a young Israeli virtuoso, barely out of his teens, who had played Miami Beach: Pinchas Zukerman.
Decades later, he was still “Pinky” to Drucker.
The artists became her friends., with the classical music stars often staying at her home on Miami Beach.
Piano virtuoso Vladimir Horowitz would only eat kosher chickens and fresh Atlantic gray sole so Drucker flew it in.
Soprano Beverly Sills said of Drucker in 2006, “When you have Judy for a friend, you don’t need any others. She has left a trail of friends instead of business relationships.”
Classical pianist André Watts and Drucker shared the same birthday — she was 18 years his senior. “No matter where he is, he always calls me,” Drucker told the Herald in 2006.
Artist Romero Britto painted a pop portrait of his friend, Drucker, in a tribute held at Britto Central on Lincoln Road in 2016.
In 1991, Drucker was to celebrate her 25th anniversary as a presenter but the Concert Association was broke. She called Pavarotti. He said he would sing for free.
She called another friend, violinist Itzhak Perlman, to tell him Pavarotti was playing. Perlman immediately said he was going to come, too. She then asked conductor Vladimir Ashkenazy if he could help her find a pianist for the concert. So he played the piano.
“Pavarotti, Perlman and Ashkenazy did an encore together. It was one of the high points of my life,” Drucker remarked years later.
Drucker was a “life force,” said Richard-Jay Alexander, a director/ writer for Barbra Streisand, Bernadette Peters, Kristin Chenoweth and others.
“She made an indelible mark on the arts, here in South Florida,” Jay-Alexander said from his home in Miami Beach. “She was an unstoppable train and, if you stop and look at her accomplishments, we need to be grateful to her for that — rough edges and all.”
OVERCOMING ARTS’ OBSTACLES
Drucker’s musical journey wasn’t without its “rough edges.” The Concert Association removed Drucker amid a bankruptcy filing in 2007.
“She aged overnight when that happened to her,” her grandson Jeffrey Lynne said. “She’d been dying slowly when her baby was taken away from her. For all the accolades nationally, her greatest gift and joy was always getting on stage and explaining to her audiences what they were about to see.”
Drucker would regain the spotlight. She joined the Florida Grand Opera as senior artistic adviser in 2007. Then, under a revamped Concert Association banner, she was reinstalled as its artistic director in 2010.
Drucker presented shows at the New World Center in Miami Beach when the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts Center, where the Concert Association was a founding resident company, declined to reinstate the group. “It takes a lot to knock me down,” Drucker — then 82 — told the Herald in 2010.
Drucker’s survivors include her daughters Vicki Schwartz and Kathy Drucker and son Andrew Drucker, seven grandchildren and six great-grandchildren. Services will be private.
A public memorial may be held after the coronavirus pandemic.