Menahem Pressler
Brilliant pianist who fled Nazi Germany and was the founder and linchpin of the Beaux Arts Trio
MENAHEM PRESSLER, who has died aged 99, was the German-born pianist of the Beaux Arts Trio, one of the world’s finest post-war classical ensembles; he was the only member to remain with the trio during its 53 year existence, becoming a symbol of chamber music artistry throughout their thousands of concerts and hundreds of recordings.
Pressler, who was blessed with a fine pianistic technique, a delicate touch on the keyboard and a sensitive ear, had been enjoying a busy schedule of concerts in the US when a meeting in the early 1950s with the pianist Robert Casadesus got him thinking about more intimate ways of making music.
Pressler was at Tanglewood Music Festival in the summer of 1954 when he was asked by a representative from the Parlophone record company if he could form a trio. He approached the violinist Daniel Guilet, who had travelled with the French composer Maurice Ravel, and the cellist Bernard Greenhouse. Encouraged by Casadesus, in whose house they rehearsed, the Beaux Arts Trio was born, giving their first of what they thought would be five or six concerts a year in the spring of 1955.
Within two years they had released a magnificent LP featuring the piano trios of Ravel and his compatriot Gabriel Fauré, and had an international touring schedule of up to 80 concerts a year to be fitted around teaching commitments.
Their London debut in 1958 attracred audience of barely 150 people dotted around the Royal Festival Hall. Yet two years later they played to a much larger audience in the Wigmore Hall with Beethoven piano trios that, in the words of one critic, “came as near perfection as one could reasonably expect in an imperfect world”.
The Beaux Arts Trio not only tackled music written for their three instruments, but also cultivated the wider repertoire. They embraced newer works by the likes of Charles Ives and Ned Rorem; temporarily expanded their remit to perform quintets, sextets and octets with friends; and recorded Beethoven’s Triple Concerto with the London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Bernard Haitink.
Over the years the string players occasionally changed: Isidore Cohen and Daniel Hope were among the subsequent violinists, while Peter Wiley and Antonio Meneses occupied the cellist’s chair. But Pressler, a slight, baby-faced man with a sparkling technique and a refined sense of style, remained the one constant.
Despite the give and take involved in chamber music, he was fully aware of the piano’s role as first among equals. “The sound of a piano trio is determined to a very great extent by the piano,” he would tell interviewers, reminding them of a story that he had heard told by the violinist David Oistrakh: “What happens when you put the violin on top of the piano? Fine. But what happens when you put the piano on top of the violin?”
For Pressler the quest for the ideal performance remained constant. “The playing of the works was always a search for more beauty,” he told The Times of Israel. “The bluebird of happiness – we were looking for that.”
Max Jacob Pressler was born in Magdeburg, in eastern Germany, on December 16 1923, recalling that “like all middle-class intelligentsia, there was a piano in the house”. On Kristallnacht, November 9 1938, his family’s clothing store was ransacked and the next day he was thrown out of high school.
The following year Pressler and his immediate family used their Polish passports to flee to Italy on the pretext of taking a holiday; later they sailed from Trieste to Palestine. His uncles, aunts and grandparents were murdered in the concentration camps. At the age of 17 he adopted the name Menahem, Hebrew for comfort or solace, although early reviews continued to refer to him as Max Pressler.
Having shown promise as a pianist in prewar Germany, he took lessons at the Tel Aviv Conservatory with Leo Kestenberg, who had studied with Busoni and had also been forced out of Germany. He made his debut as the soloist in Saint-saëns’s Piano Concerto with the Palestine Symphony Orchestra, which was managed by Kestenberg. In 1946 Pressler travelled to the US to take part in the Debussy competition in San Francisco. The contest required 27 solo piano works by Debussy to be known by heart, but fewer than a dozen had been available in Palestine.
Having flown into New York, he quickly acquired sheet music for the missing pieces and over the next few days memorised them on the transcontinental train using a dummy keyboard. The contestants played behind a screen, identified only by numbers, and No 2, Pressler, was the judges’ unanimous choice as winner.
The following year Pressler was being billed in concerts around America as “the sensational 18-year-old pianist”, even though he was 23, and on other occasions he was hailed as “the virtuoso Hitler created”. He also made his first foray into the studio, recording an album of music from the Paul Henreid-katharine Hepburn film Song of Love (1947) about the pianist Clara Schumann and her composer husband Robert, although Artur Rubenstein had made the soundtrack for the film.
Appropriately it was in Schumann’s Piano Concerto that Pressler made his US debut in November 1947, with the Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Eugene Ormandy. That led to several more appearances with the orchestra. “Young Pressler not only plays with fiery inspiration but he laughs, weeps and tosses his hair around as he tickles on the keyboard,” noted one observer.
He was soon criss-crossing the US to give solo recitals and playing concertos with the country’s leading orchestras conducted by Dimitri Mitropoulos, George Szell, Leopold Stokowski and the like. By 1955 he had released recordings of solo piano music by Grieg and Prokofiev and had joined the music school at Indiana University, Bloomington, remaining as a teacher there for the rest of his career.
In 2007 the Beaux Arts Trio gave a pair of farewell concerts at the Wigmore Hall, which had long been their second home. Afterwards Matthew Rye, the Daily Telegraph critic, wrote of Pressler: “He has always been one of the most responsive yet self-effacing chamber musicians and here there was the sense that he was always moving with the performance while at the same time leading it.”
The trio disbanded the following year. Rather than retire, the 85-year-old Pressler then revived the solo career that he had abandoned more than half a century earlier. He embarked on an ambitious schedule of concerts, including a return to Germany on the 70th anniversary of Kristallnacht. Six years later, at the age of 90, he made his debut with the Berlin Philharmonic, performing Mozart’s Piano Concerto No 17 in G major in a concert conducted by Simon Rattle that was televised around the world.
In 2015 he received an honorary doctorate from the Royal Academy of Music in London and released a disc of Mozart piano sonatas demonstrating, according to Gramophone magazine, “an intellectual and emotional grasp of music second to none”.
Menahem Pressler married Sara in 1949. She predeceased him in 2014; they had a son, Amittai, and a daughter, Edna. Latterly his companion was Lady Annabelle Weidenfeld, a former paramour of the pianist Artur Rubenstein before her marriage to the publisher Lord Weidenfeld; in 2018 the 94-year old Pressler dedicated a new album of music by Debussy to her.