2023-05-09 14:57:42
His small size, his jovial look and his exceptional artistic longevity – more than seventy years of career – had made him the mascot of the public and musical stages in recent years: the pianist Menahem Pressler, co-founder of the famous Beaux Arts Trio, considered as the most important piano trio of the XXe century, died on Saturday May 6 in London at the age of 99. Since the dissolution of his chamber music triad in 2008, of which he was de facto the dean, the musician had returned to his early career as a soloist.
Born on December 16, 1923 in Magdeburg, Saxony-Anhalt (Germany), into a middle-class Jewish family (his father owned a workshop and a fabric shop), the young Menahem had started playing the violin before choosing the piano. He was 9 years old when the Nazis obtained a majority in the Reichstag in 1933, and will remember all his life Kristallnacht (November 9, 1938) which decided the family exodus to Palestine, then under English protectorate. “It was there that I truly became a man, from a teenager that I was. I have forged a discipline, an ethic, values capable of guiding me for life.said the pianist in an interview with Frédéric Gaussin, available on the site I play the piano, pointing out that the rest of his family, grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins, had all died in Auschwitz.
In Tel-Aviv, Menahem Pressler studied with Eliahu Rudiakov (1907-1969) and Leo Kestenberg (1882-1962), then director of the future Israel Philharmonic Orchestra with which he performed in concert. In 1946, after the Second World War, the young man, freshly married, decided to emigrate to the United States to launch his career.
He won first prize at the International Debussy Competition in San Francisco, which allowed him to make his debut at Carnegie Hall with the Concerto for piano and orchestra, by Schumann, under the baton of Eugene Ormandy (1899-1985) at the head of the Philadelphia Orchestra. He has since toured extensively in North America as well as in Europe with the orchestras of New York, Chicago, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Dallas, San Francisco, London, Paris, Brussels, Oslo, Helsinki and many others.
In America, he meets Franz Werfel, Thomas Mann, Arnold Schönberg, Igor Stravinsky, Franz Wachsmann, Alma Mahler, the pianist Egon Petri, with whom he studies, for a summer, at Mills College, in Oakland (California) , and above all Eduard Steuermann, a pupil of the great pianist and composer Ferruccio Busoni, who exerted a decisive influence on him. All his life, Pressler felt he was the guardian of this precious heritage. “My career followed its course for a few years, continue Pressler. I had made a few solo records for MGM − Schumann, Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Ernst Bloch, Milhaud… − and I wanted to record some chamber music. I was thinking of a Mozart trio, but did not belong to any constituted ensemble. »
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