The German-born co-founder of the Beaux Arts Trio, pianist Menahem Pressler, who has died aged 99, will be remembered for an emotional delicacy that recalled an earlier, more sensitive musical era. His playing has been described as technically faultless and emotionally irrepressible.
Pressler co-founded the Beaux Arts Trio in 1955 with violinist Daniel Guilet and cellist Bernard Greenhouse at the Berkshire Music Festival in Lenox, Massachusetts.
It was credited with raising the profile of the piano trio to new heights and contributing to an international revival of chamber music. “We wanted to create a particular sound,” Pressler said, in a bid to achieving sonic beauty and technical perfection.
The radiance of his playing did not go unnoticed by the musical fraternity. In 1978 a Gramophone profile described his piano playing as reflecting “his sparkling, ebullient nature, adding that “he is the most voluble and jocular member of the ensemble”.
The group itself changed many times over the years. Isidore Cohen, then Daniel Hope succeeded Guilet, while Peter Wiley and later Antonio Meneses replaced Greenhouse. Pressler remained the one constant.
The trio became noted for its high standards of technique and elegance in its international performances.Focusing on the great piano trios of the classical and romantic eras, it recorded the entire trio repertoire for the Philips label.
Whether they were playing Brahms, Schubert, Debussy or Schumann, you could hear Pressler’s subtle, yet magisterial line retain its sonorous and joyous feel. Pressler emotively described the desire to find beauty in music as “a quest for the bluebird of happiness”.
But the Beaux Arts also embraced less conventional music by composers such as Hummel, Korngold, Zemlinsky, Ives, George Rochberg, David N Baker and Ned Rorem, some of whom also wrote works for the trio.
The group’s touring experiences were not always comfortable. Pressler was confronted with out-of-tune, battered or broken pianos.
Some page turners were unable to read music. After the Trio’s final concert in 2008, Pressler might have been expected to retire, confident in his reputation as an outstanding chamber musician.
At the Beaux Arts’ final concert in Lucerne in September 2008, with violinist Hope and cellist Meneses, the group could look back on many acclaimed recordings, notably its 1979 Haydn and 1986 Brahms trio discs.
But retirement was far from Pressler’s mind. After giving most of his life to chamber work, he revived his solo career at the age of 85, playing favourite pieces for piano and piano and orchestra.
His debut as a concert pianist came at the age of 90 in January 2014, when he played Mozart’s Major Piano Concerto No 17 with Semyon Bychkov. Sir Simon Rattle was so moved by his performance that he invited him to play Mozart’s Piano Concerto in A Major in that orchestra’s New Year concert under his baton. By then he was also releasing several acclaimed recordings of Beethoven, Mozart and Schubert on La Dolce Volta label.
While Pressler radiated a sense of tranquillity both in his music and his personality, his early life could not have been more traumatic.
Menahem Pressler receiving the Yehudi Menuhin Award in Madrid in 2012 (Photo: Getty Images)
He was born Max Jacob, one of three children of Moshe and Judith (Zavderer) Pressler in Magdeburg, Germany, and started playing the piano at six. He was already an accomplished performer as a teenager, taught secretly by a church organist after Hitler’s persecution intensified.
But on Krystallnacht in November 1938 he hid as the thugs of the Nazi Sturmabteilung began their attack. He could remember the terrible sound of banging in the street just before the Nazis broke into the family shop, a gentleman’s outfitters. He was 14 years old.
“The thugs broke into our family shop in Magdeburg — Pressler told The Guardian in 2008. His English was still laced with the German accent of his childhood and his vivid memories returned hauntingly as he spoke.
Yet, despite the terror of this experience, he insisted that not all Germans were bad. Some SA officers helped his brother Leo when he fell off his bike and broke his leg.
He also acknowledged the help given by Kitzel, his piano teacher, who braved obvious danger by continuing to teach Pressler piano in secret. In a final act of faith, Kitzel sent him a parcel containing Debussy’s Reflets dans l’Eau when the family left Germany the following year and arrived in Trieste, en route to Haifa.
His parents, his brother Leo and sister Selma were now safe, but his grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins all died in the Holocaust death camps.
In Haifa, the young Pressler was traumatised by loss and dislocation. He developed a life- threatening eating disorder and one day, as he played Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 31, he fainted. But the sonata proved to be an epiphany.
“It has idealism,” he said of the piece. “It has hedonism, it has regret, it has something that builds like a fugue. And at the very end, something that is very rare in Beethoven’s last sonatas — it is triumphant. It says, ‘Yes, my life is worth living.’”
At the age of 16, Pressler performed with the Palestine Symphony Orchestra (now the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra).
He changed his name from Max to Menahem, which means “comforter” but left Israel in 1946 for the US. At his debut at the Carnegie Hall he played Schumann’s Piano Concerto with Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra, winning rave reviews.
Pressler went on to win the Debussy International Piano Competition in San Francisco in 1946, and his virtuosity would be acknowledged in the following years when he performed with major international orchestras. But in 1955, aged 32, he made a key decision.
He, with Guilot and Greenhouse, launched the Beaux Arts Trio. The ensemble would be his permanent base, even while he continued to work as a concerto soloist.
At the same time he also began teaching at the Indiana University in Bloomington, another lifelong commitment. There he met many luminaries among his fellow exiles: Arnold Schoenberg, Igor Stravinsky, Thomas Mann, Oskar Kokoschka, Frank Waxman and Artur Schnabel.
A pivotal moment came for him on the 70th anniversary of Kristallnacht in 2008, when the violinist Hope, whose own family was forced to flee Nazi Berlin, decided to hold a commemorative concert in the Tempelhof, Berlin’s Nazi-era airport.
The 84-year-old Pressler took part alongside other leading international artists, performing Brahms, Ernest Bloch, JS Bach, and a revival of popular music from the Weimar Republic.
Pressler played Beethoven’s penultimate Sonata No 31, the one which had led him out of his trauma following the family’s escape from Nazi Germany. He chose it, he said, because it was the piece of music that helped give expression to his experience.
“That night is certainly something to remember,” he said. “It obviously reminds me of the horrific persecution, but in a way, being able to take part in the concert makes me feel very, very fortunate.
"I had the luck to go to Israel, which saved my life, while many others didn’t and still now, at the age of 84, I’m relishing music more than ever.”
It was, Pressler said, partially the suffering he experienced that made him the acclaimed musician he has become. “You get wrinkles not just on your face, but also in your heart – they reflect your experience, your suffering and your pleasure.”
Pressler married Sara Scherchen in 1949, and they had a son, Amittai, and a k, Edna. Sara predeceased him in 2014. He is survived by their children and his partner since 2016, Annabelle Weidenfeld.
Menahem Pressler: born December 16, 1923. Died May 6, 2023
