Obituary, Menahem Pressler (1923-2023)

The German-born Israeli-American pianist and pedagogue Menahem Pressler (מנחם פרסלר) has died at the age of 99. Perhaps best known for his performances and recordings with the Beaux Arts Trio, which he co-founded in 1955 with violinist Daniel Guilet and cellist Bernard Greenhouse, he also made a great many recordings as a solo artist.

As a German Jew born in the early twentieth century, Pressler’s youth and early adulthood are an all-too-familiar catalogue of oppression and hardship at the hands of fascism. His parents’ business in Magdeburg was destroyed in the 1938 Kristallnacht pogrom along with countless others (in a 2008 interview with the UK’s Guardian newspaper, Pressler’s vivid recounting of the event slipped unconsciously, and chillingly, into the present tense). Many of his relatives died in concentration camps. The family fled Germany in 1939, settling in what was then the British Mandate of Palestine, and Pressler (born Max Jakob) took the Hebrew name Menahem.

A triumph in the Debussy International Piano Competition in 1946 slingshotted Pressler to fame, and he made his Carnegie Hall debut the following year with Schumann’s Piano Concerto, with the Philadelphia Orchestra under Eugene Ormandy. At the same time he was active as a performer on the Palestine Broadcasting Service, which transmitted trilingually in Arabic, Hebrew and English from Ramallah until 1948, and as Kol Yisrael and Al Quds Arabic Radio left a lasting legacy on both the Israeli and Palestinian communities that subsequently developed.

Menahem Pressler, to the right of the microphone, with Palestine Broadcasting Service colleagues in 1947 after a performance of the Schumann Piano Concerto

1955 saw sizeable changes of direction for Pressler – with him not only joining the piano faculty at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music but also meeting Guilet and Greenhouse at the Berkshire Festival (now the Tanglewood Festival) in western Massachusetts, initially with the aim of recording Mozart’s complete piano trios. This successful collaboration developed into the formation of the long-lived and universally-acclaimed Beaux Arts Trio, which would continue to set the benchmark for piano trios until disbanding in the late 2000s, with Pressler the only member to remain throughout the ensemble’s entire existence.

By no means limited to Mozart, the Trio recorded just about the entire piano trio repertoire – Beethoven, Dvořák, Haydn, Schubert, Ravel and more – as well as championing contemporary works by Charles Ives, the late Ned Rorem and others. In earlier, chiefly Classical repertoire, they were noted for their exquisite balance – no mean task, with the modern piano, a robust and sonorous instrument, often in danger (at least in the hands of less sensitive performers) of obliterating its two partners. The Times’s John Rockwell even suggested in the late 1970s – not without some justification – that the Beaux Arts Trio had helped give rise to a more general revival of interest in chamber music among audiences.

Pressler remained active well into his old age, participating in 2008 commemorative events in Germany marking the 70th anniversary of Kristallnacht and giving the valedictory concerts of the final iteration of the Trio with violinist Daniel Hope and cellist Antonio Meneses. December 2013 saw a new milestone – how many other artists could claim to have made their debut with the Berlin Philharmonic at the age of 90?

Menahem Pressler’s Berliner Philharmoniker debut

A long relationship with fellow Israeli pianist Sara Scherchen, whom Pressler married in 1949 and who died in 2014, produced two children, Amittai (today a radiologist) and Edna (a psychologist). From 2016 until his death earlier this month, his partner was English artist manager Annabelle Weidenfeld, who likewise survives him.

Menahem Pressler as soloist

Beaux Arts Trio